Stiffness prediction of multilayer-connected biaxial weft-knitted fabric-reinforced composites

Based on the representative volume element (RVE) model of single layer in multilayer-connected biaxial weft-knitted (MBWK) fabric-reinforced composites, the elastic properties of multilayer-connected biaxial weft-knitted fabric-reinforced composites have been developed and presented hereafter. The average stiffness matrix of the multilayer-connected biaxial weft-knitted fabric-reinforced composites, taking into account the contribution the final geometrical of the knitting loops, can be obtained by the volume average stiffness of the unidirectional composites with different local coordinate system, and the engineering elastic constants of this kind of composites have been figured out. Numerical predictions have compared to the results of tensile tests performed on composite samples. The percentage error of the numerical prediction results and the experimental results is less than 10%.