Experimental and numerical study on cross-ply woven textile composite with notches and cracks

The fracture toughness and strength of textile composite structures are addressed in the paper through a combination of experimental and numerical studies. A series of tensile specimens are designed and tested to determine the fracture properties of a twill weave textile composite and to verify the capability of a cohesive zone model for predicting composite strength. It is shown that the cohesive zone model is able to predict strengths of notched samples that display different stress gradients. Compared to experimental results, the accuracy of the predicted strength is within 10%. Furthermore, a simple and practical method for obtaining the cohesive zone model parameters is proposed.