Draping of textile composite reinforcements:: Continuous and discrete approaches

The textile reinforcements used for composites are multiscale materials. A fabric is made of woven yarns themselves composed of thousand of juxtaposed fibres. For the simulation of the draping of these textile reinforcements several families of approaches can be distinguished in function of the level of the modelling. The continuous approaches consider the fabric as a continuum with a specific behaviour: The discrete approaches use models of some components such as the yarns and sometimes the fibres. Different approaches used for the simulation of woven reinforcement forming are investigated in the present paper. Among them, an approach based on semi discrete finite elements made of woven unit cells under biaxial tension and in-plane shear is detailed. The advantage and inconvenient of the different approaches are compared.