Tailoring fabric geometry of plain-woven composites for simultaneously enhancing stiffness and thermal properties

This paper proposes a numerical optimization method to design the mesoscale architecture of textile composite for simultaneously enhancing mechanical and thermal properties, which compete with each other making it difficult to design intuitively. The base cell of the periodic warp and fill yarn system is served as the design space, and optimal fibre yarn geometries are found by solving the optimization problem through the proposed method. With the help of homogenization method, analytical formulae for the effective material properties as functions of the geometry parameters of plain-woven textile composites were derived, and they are used to form the inverse homogenization method to establish the design problem. These modules are then put together to form a multiobjective optimization problem, which is formulated in such a way that the optimal design depends on the weight factors predetermined by the user based on the stiffness and thermal terms in the objective function. Numerical examples illustrate that the developed method can achieve reasonable designs in terms of fibre yarn paths and geometries.