Engineering Design and Mechanical Property Characterisation of 3D Warp Interlock Woven Fabrics

3D warp interlock fabrics have been used both in composite materials as fibrous reinforcement as well as in protective solutions against impact mainly due to their improved capacity to absorb energy by higher intra-ply resistance to delamination. However, depending on the type of architecture used, the binding warp yarns may provide different types of mechanical behaviour. By the same, the choice of the yarn raw material coupled with the suited 3D warp interlock architecture is still a challenge to solve due to the lack of knowledge on the optimized fabric parameters to be chosen. Thus, to fill this gap, we have designed, produced on same dobby loom and tested different types of 3D warp interlock architectures (O-T 4 3–4 Basket 3–3 and A-T 4 5–4 Twill 6) with different types of raw material (E-glass EC9 900 Tex, para-aramid 336 Tex and flax Tex 500 yarns). Thanks to these tests, it has been highlighted different mechanical behaviours of 3D warp interlock fabrics with the same weave pattern but with different types of yarns (E-glass, flax and para-aramid) both in the warp and weft directions. It has been also revealed that the warp shrinkage of warp yarns inside the woven structure has a major influence on the whole fabric behaviour.