Effect of Nesting on the Permeability of Multilayer Unidirectional Fabrics

Nesting of layers is the main source of the variations in permeability values in liquid composite molding (LCM) processes. In this paper, the permeability of unidirectional fabrics was modeled as a function of layer shift and geometrical yarn parameters to study the effect of nesting. Firstly, three different unit cells of two layers were modeled based on the range of layer shift and decomposed into zones of characteristic yarn arrangement, respectively. The overall permeability of each unit cell was then modeled as a mixture of local permeabilities of different zones with the electrical resistance analogy. Secondly, every two adjacent layers were regarded as porous media with different permeabilities. The permeability of multilayer unidirectional fabrics was then modeled with electrical resistance analogy. As the unpredictability of layer shifting in actual process, the statistical characteristics were analyzed theoretically and validated with experimental measurements. Excellent agreement was found between predictions and experiment data.