Mechanical behavior of commercial polypropylene woven fabrics : Experimental and numerical analysis

HERRERA-FRANCO P.J.; AGALIOTIS E,; FLORES-JOHNSON E.A.; BERNAL C.

Workshop; Workshop on Deformation and failure of polymers and composites; 2018

ITPN - Institut für Polymerwerkstoffe e.V.

The use of reinforced polymer composites have been growing during the last decades due to its high performance and structural applications in aerospace, automobile and marine industries and so on. Woven-fabric composites, also termed textile composites, are a promising alternative to conventional composites. Woven fabrics are also used in thermoplastic self-reinforced composites because they could provide better mechanical properties compared with traditional composites. This material could show high ratios of strain to failure in tension, compression or impact load. In addition, it can be considered environmentally friendly due to their easy recyclability. This property and their low density make them an appealing alternative over traditional composites in many structural applications. The mechanical properties of these composites depends on many factors, like yarn spacing, yarn size, yarn ondulation, woven architecture and volume fraction [2]. Hence, considering the potential applications and importance of woven composites it is essential to assess woven geometries as reinforcement before composite development. Modelling mechanical properties of these composites are extremely challenging. Numerical models offer a practical approach to characterize the behavior of different types of reinforcements; however, the development of a model for woven fabrics is a complex task.The aim of this work is to develop a numerical model in Abaqus/Explicit to study tensile properties of a low‐cost commercial polypropylene (PP) woven fabric to be used as textile composite. In order to obtained a better approach to material behavior this study also include geometry, morphology and weave pattern measures of woven and tapes in both warp and weft directions. A 3D finite-element model was successfully built by using morphology and mechanical properties experimentally obtained It was observed that the fabric mechanical behavior is mainly affected by the internal geometry of the woven fabric. The numerical model accurately reproduced visual observations of the fabric mode of failure observed in the experiments.