CAD APPLICATIONS FOR COMPOUND WOVEN FABRICS
CAD APPLICATIONS FOR COMPOUND WOVEN FABRICS

Summary/Abstract: Woven fabrics consist of at least two sets of yarns (warp and weft) that are interlaced at right angles to each other. The woven structures that only contain two systems of yarns are called simple woven fabrics, while those that include at least 3 systems are considered compound structures. There are many structural variants of compound woven fabrics (double/triple/multiple compact structures, spacer fabrics etc.). The structural characteristics of each structure induce specific properties that enable them to be used in art and design applications, but also in industries such as engineering, aerospace, automotive, biomedical, leisure etc. Compound woven fabrics (principally produced by the multiple-warp weaving method) have long been used for the manufacturing of double and triple cloths for bags, webbings and carpets. Nowadays, due to superior mechanical properties, the use of compound woven fabrics as technical textiles and especially as a reinforcing medium for composites is becoming a popular choice. As a result, some of the CAD producers which were, until recently, mainly oriented towards developing software applications for simple woven fabric design, started to pay more attention to this subject offering performing software solutions for the design of compound woven structure. This paper presents the main CAD solutions available on the market in this field (TexGen, WiseTex, ScotWeave, 3D Weave) and focuses on the TexM software, a learning-oriented solution for compound woven fabrics design, created by researchers from Faculty of Textile-Leather and Industrial Management of Iaşi, Romania. In comparison to the other aforementioned software, TexM makes use of a sectioning method to obtain a graphic representation of the weave structure in each layer. TexM is now used for some time and the excellent results of the students confirm the usefulness of this kind of educational software in understanding the structure of compound woven fabric.

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