FIRST
WORLD CONFERENCE ON 3D FABRICS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS(April 10-11 2008)
The first keynote speaker, Alan Prichard of Boeing, stressed the potential of woven 3D fabrics to reduce the weight of future generations of aircraft. Two other keynote speakers, John Crofts of the UK Home Office and Jack Gillespie, Director of the Center for Composite Materials in the University of Delaware, described the applications to personal protection from knife attack and protective shields on military vehicles. Keynote speaker Xiaoming Tao of Hong Kong Polytechnic University introduced the role of smart materials in technical textiles. Although all fabrics are 3D structures, John Hearle, Conference Chair, pointed out that the term 3D fabrics has come to mean thick planar sheets or shaped solid forms with multiple layers of yarns, hollow structures and thin 3D shells in complex shapes. Although some have a longer history, their development increased in the 1980s as potential reinforcements for composites. Several papers at the conference came from the pioneers (Mansour Mohamed and Nandan Khokar) of specially designed machines, which are now being used by companies that they have set up. In contrast to this approach, Xiaogang Chen, co-Chair of the conference, described how commercial machinery, in association with CAD software, could be used to produce a variety of 3D solid, shell and hollow fabrics. Other speakers covered advances in 3D braids, which structurally have similarities to weaving, but there is an economic limitation in that there is no analogue in braiding to shuttleless weaving so that whole yarn packages have to be moved round. Knitting featured in other papers. Here advances by machinery makers have made it possible to make complete 3D garments, instead of having to sew together separate pieces, and to make spacer fabrics, which have applications in medical and other devices. Another group of papers described the properties of 3D fabrics for a variety of applications, from concrete reinforcement to pleated haute couture, and how they could be modelled. In his concluding remarks, John Hearle pointed out the diversity of applications and manufacturing methods for 3D fabrics. He said that a priority is the development of predictive technology. If the textile community is to meet the needs of engineering users, it must provide quantitative data for their design procedures. A CD with the papers of the conference and a delegate list is available from Dr X Chen (xiaogang.chen@manchester.ac.uk) at a cost of £78. |
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