Finite element simulation of textile materials at mesoscopic scale

International audienceThis paper presents a finite element simulation of the mechanical behaviour of woven fabrics or textile composites at the mesoscopic scale, i.e. at the scale of contact-friction interactions between elementary fibers. In our model, each fiber constituting the studied woven sample is taken is represented by a finite strain 3D beam, while the focus is put on the detection and taking into account of contact-friction interactions between these beams. The model is first used to compute the unknown initial configuration, by simulating in a sense the weaving process. In a second step, once this initial configuration has been computed, an elastic matrix can be added to the model, in order to simulate and identify the behaviour of the sample under various loading cases