Efficient meshing technique for textile composites unit cells of arbitrary complexity

Matveev, Mikhail Y.; Brown, Louise P.; Long, Andrew C.

Abstract

Meso-scale unit cell models are often used to simulate mechanical behaviour of textile composites. Apart from reliable ways to create meso-scale geometries, such simulations require reliable meshing algorithms. While the former is made possible via dedicated textile pre-processors or high-fidelity weaving simulations, the meshing remains quite problematic for complex textiles and geometries. Even though, with a lot of user input, it is possible to create very complex meshes using meshing pre-processors, this approach remains infeasible for cases when a large number of models need to be analysed.

This paper presents a meshing approach based on the combination of local octree-refinement with surface smoothing. This allows nearly conformal meshes to be generated for geometries of any complexity which achieve accuracy comparable to that of conformal meshes. A range of unit cells was analysed using the new approach and it was shown that the error in local stresses is within 10% of the reference solution and the average error is below 7%. It was found that the computational cost of the analysis using the new meshing technique is not considerably higher than for an analysis which uses a conventional conformal mesh yet the new approach allows analysis of any geometry.

Citation

Matveev, M. Y., Brown, L. P., & Long, A. C. (2020). Efficient meshing technique for textile composites unit cells of arbitrary complexity. Composite Structures, 254, Article 112757. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compstruct.2020.112757

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 27, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jul 31, 2020
• Publication Date: Dec 15, 2020
• Deposit Date: Aug 4, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 1, 2021
• Journal: Composite Structures
• Print ISSN: 0263-8223
• Electronic ISSN: 1879-1085
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 254
• Article Number: 112757
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compstruct.2020.112757
• Keywords: Ceramics and Composites
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4811814
• Publisher URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263822320326830