parametric study on the homogenized response of woven carbon fibre composites

Abstract

Ultra-thin woven fibre composites are becoming popular in a wide range of weight-sensitive applications and hence it is important to predict their mechanical properties for accurate analysis and design purposes. This paper presents a parametric study on the homogenized response of two-ply plain woven carbon fibre composites. Influence of volume fractions, traction coefficients and fibre/resin material parameters on the laminate stiffness matrix (ABD) entries were investigated. For this study, a parametric representative unit cell is generated using a finite element pre-processor, TexGen and a Matlab based algorithm. An automated algorithmic computation of the laminate stiffness matrix is used to study its variations for different combinations of uncertain parameters. Such variations are compared with the experimental results to learn the possible reasons for the observed deviations between experimental and numerical results. It is shown that the volume fractions linearly scale the laminate stiffness entries, though interestingly, each entry has a unique scaling factor.