Braided Structures and Composites by Sohel Rana and Raul Fangueiro

Contents

Preface
Braiding is a very old textile manufacturing technique and has been traditionally used for many years to produce ropes, shoe laces, cables, and so on. Recently, this technology is getting special attention in various technical fields, such as medical, aerospace industries, civil engineering, transportation, and others, due to its ability to produce structures that can fulfill the demands imposed by these technical textile. Each of these applications needs special structures with special functionalities. Therefore, the design of these technical products requires a proper understanding of the process, mechanics, materials, structures, and various parameters. Some of these important aspects of braiding technology have been discussed separately in books and mainly in research articles. However, the main aim of writing this book is to discuss all of this important information together, focusing on the practical applications of braiding technology. This effort will be very fruitful for the engineers and scientists working in various industries to design their products or for the students and researchers to know this technology starting from the concept up to the product designing and applications.

This book presents various applications of braiding technology, which are already commercialized or in research stage and the recent advancements in terms of materials, processes, and structures to achieve the required functionalities. Each application sector has been dealt with in detail in separate chapters and written by the leading experts from each field, identifying the requirements and discussing the type of material, process, structure, and design strategy to fulfill these requirements. One important issue dealt with in this book is the mechanics of the braiding process. It is extremely necessary to understand the mechanics to identify the main parameters influencing the braiding process and produced structures and to control these parameters to achieve the desired material characteristics. This book also discusses the modeling of structure and various properties of braided structures and available techniques and software tools used for that purpose. This discussion will be highly helpful for designing various types of braided products with required properties. One complete chapter of the book has been written on braided composites. This new type of composite materials is becoming very attractive due to its benefits over conventional materials and composites. This chapter discusses the types of braided composites, their production process and new developments, properties, and applications. Detailed analysis of structure and braided composites is also presented in a separate chapter of the book.

The last chapter of the book highlights the importance of recently developed multiscale braided structures and composites. The understanding of these new materials can help to develop multifunctional products with various interesting features using braiding technology.

The specialty of this book is that it discusses the basic principles, processes, mechanics, analysis, product designing, and applications, as well as recent developments in braiding technology in terms of materials, processes, structures, and product designing. Therefore, this book has been written targeting students, teachers, researchers, engineers, and scientists working in various industries.

We express our sincere thanks and gratitude to all contributors who participated in the various chapters of this book, for the efforts and valuable contributions. Sincere thanks are also due to our colleagues from the Fibrous Materials Research Group, School of Engineering, University of Minho, for their kind help and support. We believe that this book will be an important reference to learn about the basic concepts related to braiding process and structures, to know the various applications of these materials, and also, to learn about the advanced analytical techniques required for product designing purposes. We have no doubt that a wide range of readers including students, teachers, engineers, researchers, and scientists will benefit from the discussions about braiding process, materials, products, applications, and modeling, presented in various chapters of this book.

Sohel Rana and Raul Fangueiro