Textile composite materials
A class of advanced materials, which are reinforced with textile preforms for structural or load bearing applications
A composite textile material (also called a composition material or shortened to composite) is a material made from two or more constituent materials with significantly different physical or chemical properties that, when combined, produce a material with characteristics different from the individual components.
Textile structural reinforced composites
“Textile” is defined as “…originally a woven fabric, but the term ‘textiles’ is now also applied to fibers, filaments and yarns, natural or man-made, and most products for which they are the principal raw materials. Hence, textiles are fibrous materials. Fibres in a textile are assembled into yarns or fibrous plies, which are arranged to form a textile fabric.
Textile structural composites represent a class of advanced materials, which are reinforced with textile preforms for structural or load bearing applications. As fibers and yarns in textiles are held together by friction, the yarns have to be bent or twisted to provide transversal forces, necessary for friction. The internal structure of a textile is the result of such bending of the yarns, introduced during manufacturing of the fabric.
The internal structure determines the interaction between the fibers and yarns in dry fabric during manufacturing, transferring the applied load to structural fibrous elements of the fabric, which resist the load by their deformation (primarily tension, bending/buckling, lateral compression and friction, and to a lesser extent torsion and shear).
The internal structure means yarn material and its structure and fabric structure determines the performance of a consolidated composite as well: the stress response to the local deformation depends on the local orientation of fibers, which is imposed by there in for cement architecture, and in its turn define whether damage will be initiated in that particular location and whether it will propagate.
Structural Materials
Presently, textile structural composites are part of a larger category of composite materials (Shishoo et al 1971 and Wiemer et al 2000). In general, composites can be defined as a selected combination of dissimilar materials with a specific internal structure and external shape. The unique combination of two material components leads to singular mechanical BEHAVIOR OF TEXTILE PREFORMS DURING COMPOSITE MANUFACTURING
Composite manufacturing techniques, used for textile reinforcements, are covered in Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Composites: Manufacturing and Certification Issues. Two main processes involved during the manufacturing are shaping of a textile preform on a three-dimensional mould and impregnation of the preform with resin. The behaviour of the preform during manufacturing is determined correspondingly by its formability and permeability.
The formability (drapability) of a textile fabric reflects the easiness of the initially flat fabric to conform to (drape over) a given 3D shape. The permeability of the preform is a tensor coefficient K of Darcy equation, relating the flow velocity of a fluid through the porous medium to the pressure gradient.
