Deformation properties of uncured reinforcements - a reappraisal

For more than 20 years, woven cloth reinforcements have been an integral part of strategies to control the costs of manufacture of advanced composite parts. Because of this, a substantial research effort has been put in place to model and simulate the behaviour of this form of reinforcement. This paper will present a reappraisal of the deformation properties of woven and other reinforcements through a consideration of the sorts of geometry that are experienced as challenges to composites component manufacture in the aerospace industry; and what deformation properties are required to drape these features both manually and mechanically. Lastly, some experiments will be reviewed that indicate that more deformable reinforcements can be generated to permit greater automation of the forming of some composite components.