Stiffness and Buckling Behavior of Woven Columns

TL;DR

This paper develops analytical models for the buckling load and stiffness of woven columns, providing insights into their mechanics and enabling efficient design of lightweight, resilient woven structures.

Contribution

It introduces purely analytical models for woven column mechanics, reducing reliance on computationally expensive simulations and explaining buckling behavior.

Findings

Models closely match experimental data

Different buckling modes are characterized

Provides design guidelines for woven structures

Abstract

Woven shell structures are beneficial for applications requiring lightweight, damage resilience, and design tunability, such as in wearable devices, soft robotics, and aerospace systems. A fundamental component of woven structures is the woven column. While the mechanical properties of a woven column can be determined using sophisticated finite element (FE) simulations, these FE models are computationally expensive and do not explain the underlying mechanics behind scaling relationships. In this work, we derive purely analytical models for the buckling load and stiffness of woven columns, and discuss the criteria that lead to different buckling modes of the woven columns. The simulated results based on our models closely match experimental data across various weave design parameters. This work advances our understanding of the mechanics of woven systems and serves as a baseline for the design of next-generation hierarchical structures and materials.