The compressibility of a reinforcement fabric

The resin transfer moulding (RTM) process involves the loading of dry reinforcement into a mould. After the mould is closed, resin is flowed into the mould cavity and cured. The RTM process has traditionally been used to produce low fibre volume fraction composites. There is now increasing interest in using the process to manufacture high fibre volume fraction composites for structural applications. Experiments have been conducted to monitor the force required to compress a typical plain-woven glass fibre reinforcement. The load displacement curves for monotonic loading, and for relaxation after repeated reloading cycles to a maximum load are presented. The loading cycle responses for the fabric have been fitted to power-law relationships, and the relaxation cycles have been fitted to exponential decay functions.