Flattening simulations of 3D thick sheets made of fiber composite materials

Recently, fiber composite materials have been attracting attention from industry because of their remarkable material characteristics, including light weight and high stiffness. However, the costs of products composed of fiber materials remain high because of the lack of effective manufacturing and designing technologies. To improve the relevant design technology, this paper proposes a novel simulation method for deforming fiber materials. Specifically, given a 3D model with constant thickness and known fiber orientation, the proposed method simulates the deformation of a model made of thick fiber-material. The method separates a 3D sheet model into two surfaces and then flattens these surfaces into two dimensional planes by a parameterization method with involves cross vector fields. The cross vector fields are generated by propagating the given fiber orientations specified at several important points on the 3D model. Integration of the cross vector fields gives parameterization with low-stretch and low-distortion.