Computer Modelling of 3D Woven Preforms for Composite Structures

Composite materials have a great potential for use in the aerospace, marine and transport industries due to their high specific strength and stiffness. The use of conventional 2D laminates for composite structures has been limited by their high cost of production. These laminates also exhibit relatively poor out-of-plane properties and therefore the resulting structures are critical when subjected to impact loading. Composites made from multi-layer woven fabric offer the potential of low production costs and, due to the presence of fibres in the thickness direction, should have improved impact resistance. A program to manufacture and analyse composite structures from multi-layer woven preforms is under way at the CRC-AS. This paper describes a procedure for producing a geometric model of the architecture of such multilayer woven preforms which may be used to visualise the architecture and to quantify geometric characteristics for use in further analysis.