3DTextileComp

1 Introduction 1.1 Introduction to textile composites    Recently, significant growth in the development and applications of textile composites  has been seen in many engineering fields such as automotive, aerospace and civil. Textile  composites not only inherit the advantages of unidirectional composites, such as light-weight  and high specific strength but also possess higher interlaminar shear strength, better damage tolerance and impact resistance as compared to unidirectional composites. Besides that, textile composites also offer lower manufacturing costs, ease of handling, and better drapability that makes them more suitable for manufacturing complex shapes. However, because of the complex microstructures, it is a much more challenging task to accurately predict the effective material behaviors of textile composites.                                  Figure 1: Basic weave structures of 2D woven fabric composites.    1.2 Motivation of Micromechani