Simple implementation of plain woven polypropylene fabric

With increased utilisation of simple fabrics in technical engineering and manufacturing environments the need for suitable, easy to implement material representations in simulation software has increased. A simple implementation of plain woven polypropylene fabric for inflation simulation of dunnage bags is developed. Only standard finite element software packages and a simple material calibration protocol based on numerical optimisation were used to generate a homogenised material representation for the in-plane properties of plain woven polypropylene undergoing both loading and unloading. This is achieved by performing a simple material test that represents the in situ loading state of the material, measuring the applied load and material deformation in response to that load, and mapping that response to a simulation of the same test by means of an inverse problem statement. Following the proposed method, a material response model for plain wove polypropylene was developed that captures the major responses of a measured woven test specimen.