Continuum constitutive modeling of woven fabrics

The constitutive behavior of woven fabrics is significantly influenced by distinctive yarn interactions at the fabric mesoscale. Since, in most cases, an explicit discretization at yarn level is not desirable due to the related computational effort, an improved computational approach is proposed using a simple, but powerful kinematic model linked to the deformation of a representative volume cell (RVC) at the fabric mesoscale. The constitutive model is validated experimentally for three different fabric materials and implemented as user-defined subroutine in the explicit finite-element code LS-DYNA. The model includes an enhanced formulation for rate-dependent, dissipative shear properties