Effect of reinforcement architecture on the macroscopic mechanical properties of fiberous polymer composites: A review

In order to curb the fuel consumption and corresponding CO2 emission, defence, automobile, and aerospace industries are leaning towards the use of light weight-high stiffness engineered materials like fiber reinforced polymer composites (FRPCs). One of the major advantages of FRPCs is that various properties (stiffness, tensile strength, flexural strength, etc.) can be tailored according to requirements of the application. Architecture of the reinforcement used in FRPCs has been proved to affect these properties substantially. Composite materials have seen a lot of advancement in the field of reinforcement architectures starting from the plain-woven fabrics to advanced 3D braided/woven preforms. The architecture of reinforcement must be wisely selected to design the required properties of developed composites and to reduce the overall cost without compromising the performance. The problem addressed in the present study is the selection of reinforcement architecture while developing a composite material. 2D Plain woven reinforcements are better than other reinforcements in terms of in-plane properties but their out-of-plane properties are very poor. Therefore, advanced architectures like 3D woven fabrics, 5D Braided preforms, knitted preforms, and 3D needle punched fibers are being used in various high performance applications. The present article is an attempt to analyse the effect of various available architectures of reinforcement on the macroscopic mechanical properties of FRPC laminates and to propose a systematic way to select a reinforcement.