Interlayer interaction characteristics of multi‐layered plain woven glass fabric in hemisphere forming.

Characterizing the interlayer interaction is beneficial to mitigate the manufacturing defects in the multi‐layered fabric forming of composite. However, the interlayer interactions including the force and sliding distance, and their effects on the defect generation have not been reported yet. Here, the monolayer and multi‐layered fabric hemisphere forming were conducted by experiments. Firstly, the forming force and deformation modes at different hemisphere regions are confirmed in the monolayer fabric forming as a reference. Then, in the multi‐layered forming, the interlayer interaction is confirmed to still exist in the configuration with the same ply orientations, whereas the forming force, forming force rate, and interlayer sliding are smaller than that in the configuration with different ply orientations. In addition, with the increase of layer number, the extent of interlayer interaction is improved, which intensifies the defect from the out of plane yarn buckling to the macro wrinkle in the tensile direction. Especially, it is revealed that the tensile direction of lower layer should be avoided under the shear direction of upper layer to reduce the interlayer sliding. These results obtained here provide an important reference to the multi‐layered plain woven fabric forming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]