Micromechanical modelling of thin woven fibre composites

Abstract

This paper considers micromechanics based homogenisation technique to predict mechanical properties of two-ply plain weave carbon fibre composites. Geometric properties of the laminate measured from micrographs and tow properties calculated from appropriate rules of mixtures are used to construct a representative unit cell. The unit cell is then simulated with periodic boundary conditions to obtain 6*6 stiffness matrix. A subset of the analytical results is validated by means of carefully designed experiments.