Efficient meshing technique for textile composites unit cells of arbitrary complexity.

Meso-scale unit cell models are often used to simulate mechanical behaviour of textile composites. Apart from reliable ways to create meso -scale geometries, such simulations require reliable meshing algorithms. While the former is made possible via dedicated textile pre-processors or high-fidelity weaving simulations, the meshing remains quite problematic for complex textiles and geometries. Even though, with a lot of user input, it is possible to create very complex meshes using meshing pre-processors, this approach remains infeasible for cases when a large number of models need to be analysed. This paper presents a meshing approach based on the combination of local octree-refinement with surface smoothing. This allows nearly conformal meshes to be generated for geometries of any complexity which achieve accuracy comparable to that of conformal meshes. A range of unit cells was analysed using the new approach and it was shown that the error in local stresses is within 10% of the reference solution and the average error is below 7%. It was found that the computational cost of the analysis using the new meshing technique is not considerably higher than for an analysis which uses a conventional conformal mesh yet the new approach allows analysis of any geometry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]