Model of internal geometry of textile fabrics: Data structure and virtual reality implementation

Abstract

The internal architecture of a textile affects its mechanical behaviour (deformability, draping, permeability etc.). It is also important for properties of the textile composites (stiffness, strength etc.). The internal geometry of a wide range of fabrics — 2D and 3D woven, two- and three-axial braided, knitted, multi-axial multi-ply stitched fabrics and laminates — for both relaxed and deformed states is explained. This article explains the format of the fabric internal geometry data and the algorithms of exporting the data to different modelling environments (e.g. finite element or computational fluid dynamics models). The transformation of the model into virtual reality (VR) world (VR Modelling Language) is described in detail. VR description of a textile at the micro level, based on mechanical models of the internal structure, complements the available VR representation of a textile on the macro level.