Issue 28

P. Valentino et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 28 (2014) 1-11 ; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.28.01 10 Figure 13 : Fractured specimen with twill weave 1/3 fabric reinforcement in the fill direction. The areas enclosed in the square boxes show details of the damagemechanism leading to sample failure. C ONCLUSIONS asalt fabric composite, with different twill wave reinforcements, i.e. twill 2/2 and twill 1/3, have been studied in this work by means of experimental tests and numerical finite element (FE) simulations. In particular, the mechanical response and the stiffness of a fabric reinforced composite in warp and fill direction has been analysed. The numerical FEmodel has been properly implemented assuming elliptical sections of the tows and sinusoidal shape of the yarns and particular attention has been applied to generate the RVEs geometry. The obtained results have been compared with the experimental data in order to validate the proposed model and a good agreement has been observed. Therefore the FE-method can be considered an adequate way to predict the stiffness of woven fabric composite with different geometries in themesoscopic scale or evendifferent kindof fibre reinforcement. Finally, the strength and the failure modes of the composite material, for each analysed structure and textile orientation, have been experimentally investigated. A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS NCOTELOGY LTD. is acknowledged for providing the fabrics of basalt fibres. Further thanks go to Mr M. Eisenried (Laboratory for Composite Technology (LFT - Labor für Faserverbundtechnik) at theDepartment ofMechanical Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences Regensburg) for proofreading and for generating the schematic illustrations in the CAD- System. REFERENCES [1] Barbero, J., Trovillion, J., Mayugo, J.A., Sikkil, K.K., Finite element modelling of plain weave fabrics from photomicrographmeasurements, Composite Structures, 73 (2006) 41–52. [2] Jiang, Y., Tabiei, A., Simitses, G. J., A novel micromechanics-based approach to the derivation of constitutive equations for local/global analysis of a plain-weave fabric composite, Composites Science Technology, 60 (2000) 1825-1833. [3] Ito, M., Chou, T.-W., An analytical and experimental study of strength and failure behaviour of plain weave composites, Journal of CompositeMaterials, 32 (1) (1998) 2-30. [4] Naik, N. K., Ganesh, V. K., An analytical method for plainweave fabric composites, Composites, 26(4) (1995) 281- 289. B I