The application of woven fabrics in composites manufacturing has been increased because of their special mechanical behavior. Due to the complexity of modeling and simulation of these composites, in this research a micromechanics based analytical model has been developed to predict the elastic properties of woven fabric composites. The present model is simple to use and has a high accuracy in predicting the elastic properties of woven fabric composites. One of the most important effective factors on the modeling accuracy is utilizing a proper homogenization method. Therefore, a new homogenization method has been developed by using a laminate analogy based method for the woven fabric composites. The proposed homogenization method is a multi-scale homogenization procedure. This model divides the representative volume element to several sub-elements, in a way that the combination of the sub-elements can be considered as a laminated composite. To determine the mechanical properties of laminates, instead of using an iso-strain assumption, the assumptions of constant in-plane strains and constant out of plane stress have been considered. Then, the proposed homogenization model has been combined with a micromechanical model to propose the new micromechanical model. The applied assumptions improve the prediction of mechanical properties of woven fabrics composites, especially the out of plane elastic properties. The proposed model has been evaluated by comparing the predicted results with four available experimental results available in the literature, and the accuracy of the present model has been shown.

Keywords: Woven fabric composites, analytical model, Micromechanics, homogenization

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