The Design of Cellular Fabrics with Graded Cell Distribution

Cellular textile reinforced composite with evenly distributed cell size has the characteristics of light weight, high impact strength, and it is supposed to be used as energy absorbs items in various industrial and domestic fields. Changing the cell geometric size can create the deviation of regular cellular textile to improve its mechanical properties. This paper is based on the calculation formula of cellular cell under ideal model, and combines the principle of cellular fabric weave design to fabricate the cellular structure composites. By modifying the wall length or wall thickness of the adjacent cell can create unregular cellular structure and there are two types of samples with various cell size and wall thickness made in this paper. During the weaving process, multiple warp beams are combined to supply the warps and the yarn consumption for each layer of the fabric is calculated according to their buckling degree in the fabric structure. Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (VARTM) technology is adopted to facilitate the plat shaped fabric into three-dimensional structured cellular composite. The aims of this research are to provide a feasible design and manufacturing method for cellular structure fabric with uneven cell distribution for the future composite mechanical analysis.