Mechanical Analysis of Woven Fabrics:The State of the Art

The automation and integration of processes in the textile industry is dictated by the
increasing need to offer specialized products at optimum quality and low cost, satisfying at
the same time the fast cycles of fashion trends or in the case of technical applications the
delivery of products of high qualiy and of exact properties. Under these premises, computer
engineering tools, such as computer-aided engineering (CAE) and computer-aided design
(CAD), have recently gained attention. The revolutionary role of CAE and CAD tools in the
textile industry is the guaranty that the final product meets the set specifications, optimizing
thus the quality control procedure. Moreover, the prediction of the properties and the
aesthetic features of the product before the actual fabrication can essentially benefit the
textile research community [Hu and Teng, 1996]. Especially nowadays that textile materials
can be used for the production of a wide range of technical products, such as reinforcements
in composites for aerospace or marine applications or textiles for medical applications, the
prediction of the end-product’s mechanical properties is of major importance. Furthermore,
the textile raw materials are processed under low-stress conditions and it is thus reasonable
to assume that the knowledge of the possible modifications introduced via the
manufacturing process is necessary for the final product realization (Hu, 2004).
Textiles are flexible, anisotropic, inhomogeneous, porous materials with distinct viscoelastic
properties. These unique characteristics makes textile structures to behave essentially
different compared with other engineering materials. Moreover, textiles are characterized by
an increased structural complexity. Their properties mainly depend on a complicated
combination of their structural units and their interactions. The complicated nature of the
textiles’ mechanics makes them ideal candidates for a mechanical analysis using computerbased
methods.