An Experimental Investigation into the Mechanical Behaviour of 3D Woven Fabrics for Structural Composites

3D woven composites provide efficient delamination suppression, enhanced damage tolerance, superior impact, ballistic and blast performance characteristics over 2D fabric laminates. At the same time, this type of composites, having practically straight in-plane fibers, show significantly better in-plane stiffness and strength properties than respective properties of conventional composites. But, how the in-plane elastic and strength characteristics of this type of fabrics compare with respective in-plane properties of equivalent 2D woven fabrics. This paper presents a comprehensive experimental study of the comparison of in-plane tensile, bending, crimp interchange properties of UD, 2D, 3D orthogonal, 3D angle-interlock and 3D warp interlock multi-layer structures woven from E-glass tow. The results depict that the 3D woven fabrics have considerably superior mechanical properties with much lesser crimp compared to 2D fabrics.