Biaxial tearing properties of woven coated fabrics using digital image correlation

Architectural fabrics as construction materials can experience tearing failure caused by inevitable flaws, which greatly degrade the tensile resistance. This paper presents an experimental study which deals with the crack tearing properties of PVC coated fabrics. Effect of the initial crack length and orientation on tearing behavior were investigated with quasi-static biaxial tensile loading of cruciform specimens, setting the same load rate in warp and weft directions. The brittle failure of the PVC coated fabric had always the crack propagation along warp or weft direction. Defining the tearing residual strength (TRS) as the residual load carrying capacity of a cracked fabric, it was found that the TRS decreased nonlinearly with the increase of initial crack length, but with negligible variation of the crack orientation. Moreover, to better understand the tearing failure mechanism, the full field strain was measured by 2D digital image correlation (DIC) technique. This provided a detailed distribution of the strain components near the crack tip during biaxial loading.

Automated summary

This study experimentally investigated the crack tearing properties of PVC coated fabrics, revealing that the initial crack length has an impact on tearing residual strength, while the variation of crack orientation has a negligible effect.