Paper number 317

COMPARISON OF DAMAGE BEHAVIOUR IN STRUCTURES REINFORCED BY KNITTED AND WOVEN TEXTILE FABRICS

B. Lamy, E. Dixneuf

Département Mécanique et Matériaux, Ecole Centrale de Nantes
1 rue de la Noe, BP 92101, 44321 NANTES Cedex 03, France

Summary

In many applications, composite materials are damaged by static deflections or by deflections due to impacts at low energy. Damage tolerance of glass/epoxy weft knitted textile fabric-reinforced sandwich and monolithic samples is studied in comparison with woven textile fabrics. In the first part it is shown that the knitted fabric-reinforced sandwich sheets provide greater resistance to the damage evolution than the woven sheets in case of sheets of the same thickness. Whereas, in case of sheets displaying the same number of plies a thickness effect appears. In the second part the efficiency of knitted fabrics is analysed by considering deflections through impacts on monolithic samples of the same thickness and on samples displaying the same number of plies. Damage evolutions versus the number of impacts are established for knitted and woven fabric-reinforced monolithic samples.

Keywords

knitted fabric reinforcements, woven fabric reinforcements, damage measurement, three-point bending, low energy impact deflection.