Geometrical modeling of 3D woven honeycomb fabric for manufacturing of lightweight sandwich composite material.

Sandwich structures with composite honeycomb core and skin have been mostly used for a variety of engineering applications. There are different man-made honeycomb structures with metal, polymer, and paper honeycomb cell geometry which provide minimum weight, least material content and minimal material cost. In this paper, the textile fiber-based 3 D woven honeycomb structure is engineered by using fabric geometrical parameters and mathematical expressions have been developed to calculate the repeat unit weight, fiber volume fraction (FVF) and specific weight of 3 D woven honeycomb structures. Five 3 D woven honeycomb fabric samples with different cell sizes were produced using model-based construction parameters on a customized rapier weaving machine. Fabric dimensional parameters were determined experimentally to validate the model value with actual results. A reasonably high agreement was observed between experimental and theoretical values. The model can be used as a tool to engineer woven honeycomb reinforcement architecture to produce lightweight structural composite materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]