Woven fabrics are used in many applications, including ballistic armors and fabric-reinforced composites. Advances in small-scale technologies are enabling new applications including fabrics with embedded electronics, active yam materials, or microfluidics. In order to facilitate the design and improvement of such applications, we propose a modeling approach that relates the macroscopic response of the fabric to the behavior of the underlying yarns and weave. The resulting continuum model is more computationally efficient than a discrete model that represents every yam or fiber explicitly. Because it is physically based on the fabric mesostructure, the model can be used to predict the behavior of novel fabric designs. It can be easily tailored to a wide variety of different applications through the choice of suitable, physically motivated constitutive behaviors for the components that make up the assumed underlying mesostructure. We first describe a model suitable for slip-free planar deformations of a plain weave Kevlar® fabric in response to in-plane loads. We next extend this model to three dimensional behaviors through the development of an anisotropic shell implementation that includes the resistance of the fabric to bending and twist.
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