3D Weaving: Exploiting Conventional Looms to Create Dome-Shaped Fabrics and Evaluation of Dome-Shaped Fabrics

3D shaped fabrics are widely used for producing technical applications including textile composites, medical textiles, and protective textiles. Textile engineers and material scientists have developed 3D textile preforms for composites, which are becoming more popular in many areas due to their light weight, dimensional stability, and high strength properties. Architecture of a textile preform can vary from a simple planar sheet to complex 3D shell shapes. This book aims to exploit the potentials of conventional looms for producing dome-shaped fabrics for technical applications, such as protective helmet, aircraft seat, motorcycle seat, and bullet-proof vest for women. Second objective of this research is to develop methods for evaluating the dome effect of fabrics. A dome tester has been developed in the research with the capability of measuring the dome formability and also the fabric mouldability. The results of both evaluation methods for the dome formability revealed that loose fabric structures lead to better dome formability for all fabric types. The results also showed that increasing the number of layers for the multi-layer fabrics has produced less obvious dome effects.