Laminate mechanics for balanced woven fabrics

Laminate mechanics equations are presented for composites with balanced woven fabric reinforcements. It is shown that mimicking these textile composites with equivalent transversely isotropic (‘unidirectional’) layers requires disputable manipulations. Various micromechanics predictions of textile composite properties are currently available, however. These can be applied directly to generate the required material property data for the woven fabric laminate mechanics. The commonly used quasi-isotropic laminates with balanced woven fabric reinforcement are subsequently analysed. Closed form expressions are derived for the inplane and out-of-plane elastic properties of these quasi-isotropic laminates, which slightly differ from previous results for unidirectional reinforcement.