Computation of permeability of a non-crimp carbon textile reinforcement based on X-ray computed tomography images

The paper demonstrates the possibility of a correct (within the experimental scatter) calculation of a textile reinforcement permeability based on X-ray micro-computed tomography registration of the textile internal architecture, introduces the image segmentation procedures to achieve the necessary precision of reconstruction of the geometry and studies variability of the geometry and local permeability. The homogenized permeability of a non-crimp textile reinforcement is computed using computational fluid dynamics with voxel geometrical models. The models are constructed from X-ray computed tomography images using a statistical image segmentation method based on a Gaussian mixture model. The computed permeability shows a significant variability across different unit cells, in the range of (0.5…3.5) × 10−4 mm2, which is strongly correlated with the solid volume fraction in the unit cell.