Size Effect and Fibre Arrangement on Meso-Mechanical Modelling of Woven Fibre Composites

The mechanical behaviour of woven fibre composites is of paramount importance owing to the rapid use of these engineered materials in various industries. A meso-mechanical representative unit cell (RUC) is generally used to represent the material for predicting mechanical behaviour in a virtual environment. However, the selection of the RUC size and fibre arrangement has not been studied in detail. Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate the effect of size and the relative positioning of plies of an RUC of two-ply plain weave carbon fibre laminate on mechanical property predictions. First, a series of meso-mechanical models with different relative positionings of plies and sizes of RUCs were modelled. Then the constitutive relationship was developed for each RUC model. Finally, the calculated mechanical properties are compared with the experimental results to investigate the influence of size and relative positioning on the predictions. The results indicate that the effect of both the size and relative positioning of the RUC is minimal except for a few parameters. This leads to the conclusion that a minor effect on the mechanical properties of woven fibre composites exists especially from the size of RUC.