ANALYTICAL METHODS FOR TEXTILE COMPOSITES
necessity of continual inspection. Some textile technologies, especially stitching and
braiding, are already on the verge of producing cost effective integral structures.
Unfortunately, there are almost no models available at the time of writing for general part
shapes, even though the technological advantage of integral textile structures is a strong
motivation for their development. It is to be hoped they will be included in future editions
of the handbook.
1.2 Layout of the Handbook
The intended audience for this handbook is the practicing design engineer, who
might be assumed to be very familiar with the mechanics of composites. However, textile
composites are sufficiently new and their mechanisms of failure so unlike those of tape
laminates in so many ways, that it would be very imprudent for a designer to take any
model of a textile composite at face value and proceed to use it. Whether a model will
work, whether it is the best available, how it should be used, and what limits exist on its
accuracy and domain of applicability are questions whose correct answer requires sound
understanding of concepts that are peculiar to textiles and very recent in their development.
Therefore the handbook offers tutorial chapters on the technology and mechanics of
textile composites before the models are presented. Section 2 surveys the rich diversity of
textile processes and products. Section 3 highlights some of the distinctions between
textiles and tape laminates that designers more familiar with the latter should remember.
Section 4 details the known mechanisms of failure of textile composites, many of which
have no parallel in traditional laminates, and offers a few failure maps in cases where the
controlling microstructural and material parameters are known. Sections 5 through 7
present the models themselves, each section being prefaced by a summary of essential
geometrical and modeling concepts, which must be mastered before any judgment can be
exercised over the choice of code for a particular application. With the guidance of these
concepts and available experimental data, a critical appraisal is offered of the relative merits
of models that claim to calculate the same quantities. The reader is strongly advised to work
through all these sections to acquire at least a rudimentary understanding of the special
challenges in modeling textile composites.
Details of the codes, sample input and output decks, and user’s guides written by
the original authors are supplied in Section 8 and the appendices. Source codes for all the
