Evaluation of homogenization for global/local stress analysis of textile composites

Abstract Global/local analysis is essential for textile composites because of their unusually large microstructure. Homogenized engineering properties were used in this study to obtain global solutions. The response of a local region was approximated by several fundamental strain or stress modes. The magnitudes of these modes, which were determined from the global solutions, were used to scale and superpose solutions from refined analyses of the fundamental modes, thus obtaining a refined local solution. Results from numerical experiments showed that the use of homogenized engineering properties often results in significant errors in prediction of global response, especially at boundaries. Also, the local predictions were very sensitive to the choice of fundamental modes.