An Analytical Approach to Predict Elastic Properties of Filament-Wound Tubes

摘要

An analytical approach to predict the effective in-plane elastic properties of helical filament-wound cylindrical tubes is presented. Using a bottom-up solid modelling technique, a repeated unit cell model for a tube with ± θ winding angles is established according to the winding process parameters. The 3-dimensional unit cell is composed of three types of basic blocks. Fibre bundle crossovers, undulations and overlaps are explicitly described by the internal structures of these basic blocks. While this unit cell model can be analyzed numerically, in this paper a simpler analytical approach is established. The effective elastic properties of a filament-wound tube are determined from the in-plane stiffness matrix, which is calculated as a volume average over all blocks of the unit cell. The in-plane effective properties of a glass fibre/epoxy tube are predicted and the influence of the number of winding circuits and the shape of the fibre bundle are discussed. The results are also compared with predictions obtained by a finite element analysis and a good agreement in trend is observed.