Etude expérimentale et numérique des défauts de bouclage et de glissement lors de la mise en forme de composites structuraux à base de fibres synthétiques et végétales

Les composites à renforts fibreux sont très prisés dans les industries de pointe comme l’aéronautique ou l’automobile du fait de leur rapport propriété mécanique/masse supérieur à celui des métaux. Leur mise en forme complexe présente de forts enjeux scientifiques, notamment pour les composites à renforts tissés. En effet, les renforts tissés sont sujets à l’apparition de défauts lors de leur mise en forme sur géométries complexes à double courbure. Certains de ces défauts ont déjà fait l’objet de plusieurs études alors que d’autres, comme les défauts de bouclage et de glissement des mèches, n’ont pour le moment pas encore été totalement explorés. À l’heure actuelle, les codes de simulations ne peuvent pas prédire précisément l’apparition et le développement des défauts de bouclage et de glissement des mèches lors de la mise en forme des renforts tissés. L’une des raisons est le manque de connaissances sur l’origine et la cinématique de développement de ces défauts. Ce travail de thèse propose d’apporter plus de compréhension sur ces défauts par une approche expérimentale et numérique. Concernant le défaut de bouclage, l’influence des tensions dans les réseaux de mèches, de la nature du renfort, de l’armure du renfort et des dimensions des mèches ont été étudiés. Pour le défaut de glissement, l’influence du type de renfort, des tensions dans les mèches, de l’armure du renfort et de l’orientation des mèches dans le renfort ont été explorés. Ces résultats ouvrent des perspectives concernant l’amélioration de la qualité des pièces composites

Quantification of processing artifacts in textile composites

One of the greatest difficulties in developing detailed models of the mechanical response of textile reinforced composites is an accurate model of the reinforcing elements. In the case of elastic property prediction, the variation of fiber position may not have a critical role in performance. However, when considering highly localized stress events, such as those associated with cracks and holes, the exact position of the reinforcement probably dominates the failure mode. Models were developed for idealized reinforcements which provide an insight into the local behavior. However, even casual observations of micrographical images reveals that the actual material deviates strongly from the idealized models. Some of the deviations and causes are presented for triaxially braided and three dimensionally woven textile composites. The necessary modeling steps to accommodate these variations are presented with some examples. Some of the ramifications of not accounting for these discrepencies are also addressed

Towards comprehensive characterisation and modelling of the forming and wrinkling mechanics of engineering fabrics

Through a combination of direct measurement and inverse modelling, a route to characterising the main mechanical forming properties of engineering fabric is demonstrated. The process involves just two experimental tests, a cantilever bending test and a modified version of the uniaxial bias extension test. The mechanical forming properties of a twill weave carbon fabric have been determined, including estimates of the in-plane bending stiffness and the torsional stiffness of a sheared fabric. As a result of measuring and incorporating all the main mechanical properties of the fabric in forming simulations (tensile, shear, out-of-plane bending, in-plane bending & torsion), the specimen size-dependent shear kinematics and wrinkling response measured in experiments, is faithfully reproduced in simulations of the uniaxial bias extension (UBE) test

Three-Dimentional Textile Preform Using Advanced Textile Technologies for Composite Manufacturing

Textile reinforcement structure plays an important role in the reinforcement/composite performances during the composite manufacturing and in-service life of the composite material. Structures with a three-dimensional (3D) fiber topology are desired due to their superior multiaxial performance and efforts have been made to modify 2D textile technologies to produce complex 3D shapes. Most of these 3D solutions are based on the principle of adding out-of-plane reinforcements to a planar 2D fabric. Well-established 3D textile methods such as braiding and knitting have also been demonstrated to directly produce near net-shape structures. To understand these potentialities, the first section of this chapter will present the several textile technologies with strengths and weaknesses of these processes to manufacture technical reinforcements for composite applications. In the following sections, several applications with specific textile architectures will be given, in particular, the applications of the through-the-thickness reinforcement and 3D textile ply during the composite manufacturing

Structural textile pattern recognition and processing based on hypergraphs

The humanities, like many other areas of society, are currently undergoing major changes in the wake of digital transformation. However, in order to make collection of digitised material in this area easily accessible, we often still lack adequate search functionality. For instance, digital archives for textiles offer keyword search, which is fairly well understood, and arrange their content following a certain taxonomy, but search functionality at the level of thread structure is still missing. To facilitate the clustering and search, we introduce an approach for recognising similar weaving patterns based on their structures for textile archives. We first represent textile structures using hypergraphs and extract multisets of k-neighbourhoods describing weaving patterns from these graphs. Then, the resulting multisets are clustered using various distance measures and various clustering algorithms (K-Means for simplicity and hierarchical agglomerative algorithms for precision). We evaluate the different variants of our approach experimentally, showing that this can be implemented efficiently (meaning it has linear complexity), and demonstrate its quality to query and cluster datasets containing large textile samples. As, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical approach for explicitly modelling complex and irregular weaving patterns usable for retrieval, we aim at establishing a solid baseline

Geometrical modelling of 3D woven reinforcements for polymer composites: prediction of fabric permeability and composite mechanical properties

For a 3D orthogonal carbon fibre weave, geometrical parameters characterising the unit cell were quantified using micro-Computed Tomography and image analysis. Novel procedures for generation of unit cell models, reflecting systematic local variations in yarn paths and yarn cross-sections, and discretisation into voxels for numerical analysis were implemented in TexGen. Resin flow during reinforcement impregnation was simulated using Computational Fluid Dynamics to predict the in-plane permeability. With increasing degree of local refinement of the geometrical models, agreement of the predicted permeabilities with experimental data improved significantly. A significant effect of the binder configuration at the fabric surfaces on the permeability was observed. In-plane tensile properties of composites predicted using mechanical finite element analysis showed good quantitative agreement with experimental results. Accurate modelling of the fabric surface layers predicted a reduction of the composite strength, particularly in the direction of yarns with crimp caused by compression at binder cross-over points

3D TEXTILE PREFORMS AND COMPOSITES FOR AIRCRAFT STRCUTURES: A REVIEW

Over the last decades, the development of 3D textile composites has been driven the structures developed to overcome disadvantages of 2D laminates such as the needs of reducing fabrication cost, increasing through-thickness mechanical properties, and improving impact damage tolerance. 3D woven, stitched, knitted and braided preforms have been used as composites reinforcement for these types of composites. In this paper, advantages and disadvantages of each of them have been comprehensively discussed. The fabric architects and their specification in particular stitched preforms and their deformation mode for aerospace applications have been reviewed. Exact insight into various types of damage in textile preforms and composite that have the potential to adversely affect the performance of composite structure along with their inspection using NDT techniques have been elaborated. The research review reported in this paper can be very valuable to researchers to release the 3D composite behaviour under different loading conditions and also to get familiar with the manufacture of high quality textile composite for aircraft structures

Improving the accuracy of the uniaxial bias extension test on engineering fabrics using a simple wrinkle mitigation technique

In response to a previous investigation on the influence of specimen pre-shear and wrinkling on the accuracy of uniaxial bias extension test results [1], numerical and experimental investigations have been conducted, aimed at evaluating the use of transparent anti-wrinkle plates to mitigate errors due to wrinkling of engineering fabrics. Predictions of the numerical investigation suggest that the anti-wrinkle plates significantly improve the accuracy of kinematic measurements while introducing only a very minor stiffening effect on the axial force versus shear angle data. Results from subsequent experiments on two different engineering fabrics confirmed the numerical predictions; the accuracy and repeatability of test data was significantly improved and the maximum shear angle and axial force data measurable in the tests was significantly increased. The investigation suggests a useful role for anti-wrinkle plates in characterising the formability of engineering fabrics

Characterising, understanding and predicting the performance of structural power composites

Dramatic improvements in power generation, energy storage, system integration and light-weighting are needed to meet increasingly stringent carbon emissions targets for future aircraft and road vehicles. The electrification of transport could significantly reduce direct CO2 emissions; however, battery energy and power density limitations pose a major technological barrier. The introduction of multifunctional structural power composites (SPCs), which simultaneously provide mechanical load-bearing and electrochemical energy storage, offers new possibilities. By replacing conventional materials with SPCs, electrical performance requirements could be relaxed, and vehicle mass could be reduced; however, for SPCs to outperform monofunctional systems, significant performance and reliability improvements are still required. The use of computational models to support experimental efforts has so far been overlooked, despite wide recognition of the benefits of such a combined approach. The aim of this work was to develop predictive finite element models for structural supercapacitor composites (SSCs), and use them to investigate their mechanical, electrical, and electrochemical behaviour. A unit cell modelling technique was used to generate realistic mesoscale models of the complex microstructure of SSCs. The effects of composite manufacturing processes on the final performance of SSCs were investigated through characterisation and modelling of compaction and manufacturing defects. Numerical predictions of the elastic properties of SSCs were evaluated against data from the literature; and the presence of defects was shown to significantly degrade performance. Motivated by the large series resistance of SSCs, direct conduction models were developed to better understand electrical charge transport. Based on investigations of various current collector geometries, design strategies for the mitigation of resistive losses were proposed. To enable analysis of the combined mechanical-electrochemical behaviour of SSCs, an ion transport user element subroutine was developed but could not be validated. Overall, this work demonstrates that substantial improvements in the mechanical and electrical properties of SSCs are possible through control of the composite microstructure. The models developed in this work provide guidance for the optimisation of manufacturing processes and the design of new SSC architectures, and underpin the future certification and deployment of these emerging materials.Open Acces