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Microscale modeling of effective mechanical and electrical properties of textiles
Author(s) -
Queiruga Alejandro,
Zohdi Tarek
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
international journal for numerical methods in engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.421
H-Index - 168
eISSN - 1097-0207
pISSN - 0029-5981
DOI - 10.1002/nme.5268
Subject(s) - multiphysics , finite element method , mechanical engineering , microscale chemistry , discretization , electronics , micromechanics , computer science , dynamic relaxation , engineering , structural engineering , electrical engineering , mathematics , mathematical analysis , mathematics education , algorithm , composite number
Summary A computational framework for assisting in the development of novel textiles is presented. Electronic textiles are key in the rapidly growing field of wearable electronics for both consumer and military uses. There are two main challenges to the modeling of electronic textiles: the discretization of the textile microstructure and the interaction between electromagnetic and mechanical fields. A director‐based beam formulation with an assumed electrical current is used to discretize the fabric at the level of individual fibrils. The open‐source package FEniCS was used to implement the finite element model. Contact integrals were added into the FEniCS framework so that multiphysics contact laws can be incorporated in the same framework, leveraging the code generation and automated differentiation capabilities of FEniCS to produce the tangents needed by the implicit solution method. The computational model is used to construct and determine the mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties of a representative volume elements of a plain woven textile. Dynamic relaxation to solve the mechanical fields and the electrical and thermal fields is solved statically for a given mechanical state. The simulated electrical responses are fit to a simplified Kirchhoff network model to determine effective resistances of the textile. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.