Abstract

To target to evaluate the deformation due to only Poisson’s ratio variation of coated fabric for airship envelop, series biaxial extension tests were carried out for a particular envelop Uretek3216 and the mechanical property parameters were calculated accordingly from the plain composite theory. On the basis of elastic engineering theory, three typical cases of tension ratio 1:1, 1:2 and 1:1~1:2 were proposed for evaluation on Poisson’s ratio variation, which is cruciform specimen, inflatable fabric beam and streamline airship. Parametric analysis was carried out for each case through numerical simulation. And the geometry dimension effect was also investigated with scaled model. The significant deformation variation of airship is found from only Poisson’s ratio variation, Poisson ratio variation is necessary to be considered for accurate deformation predication of large flexible airship. The presented work is valuable to numerical analysis and engineering design for non-rigid airship structures.

Keywords:

Airship envelope, coated fabric, deformation evaluation, geometry dimension effect, poisson, tension ratio,

References

1. Brian, F. and M. Marijke, 2004. The European Design Guide for Tensile Surface Structures. Tensinet, Brussels, pp: 17-24.
   
2. Bridgens, B.N. and P.D. Gosling, 2004. Direct stress-strain representation for coated woven fabrics. Comput. Struct., 82: 1913-27.
   CrossRef    
3. Galliot, C. and R.H. Luchsinger, 2009. A simple model describing the non-linear biaxial tensile behavior of PVC-coated polyester fabrics for use in finite element analysis. Comput. Struct., 90: 438-447.
   CrossRef    
4. Galliot, C. and R.H. Luchsinger, 2011. Determination of the response of coated fabrics under biaxial stress: comparison between different test procedures. Proceeding of 5th International Conference on Textile Composites and Inflatable Structures, Structural Membranes. Barcelona, Spain, October 5-7, pp: 12.
   
5. Gao, H.J., 2010b. Structure analysis theory and performance research for large flexible airship of stratospheric platform. Ph.D. Thesis, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
   
6. Gao, H.J., W.J. Chen and G.Y. Fu, 2010a. Experiments on the mechanical properties of envelope fabrics of LTA aerostat. Spatial Struct., 16(1): 57-64, (In Chinese).
   
7. Gosling, P.D. and B.N. Bridgens, 2008. Material testing and computational mechanics-a new philosophy for architectural fabrics. Int. J. Space Struct., 23(4): 215-233.
   CrossRef    
8. Huang, S.S., W.J. Chen and S.L. Dong, 2011. Bi-axial tensile test method and analytical algorithm of elastic constants for the airship envelope fabric. Spatial Struct., 17(2): 84-90, (In Chinese).
   
9. Jorg, U., 2011. Effects on elastic constants of technical membranes applying the evaluation methods of MSAJ/M-02-1995. Proceeding of the International Conference on Textile Composites and Inflatable Structures, Structural Membranes. Barcelona, Spain, October 5-7, 2011.
   
10. Khoury, G.A. and J.D. Gillett, 1999. Airship Technology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
    
11. Kraska, M., 2002. Structural analysis of the CL-160 airship. Proceeding of the 4th International Airship Convention and Exhibition in Cambridge, England.
    
12. Miller, T. and M. Mandel, 2000. Airship envelopes: Requirements, materials and test methods. Proceeding of the 3rd International Airship Convention and Exhibition in Friedrichshafen, Germany.
    
13. Shoji, M., S. Kouichi, K. Toyotoshi, S. Yoshitaka and Y. Tatsuya, 2007. Tear propagation of a high performance airship envelope material. Proceeding of the 7th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration and Operations Conference. Belfast, Northern Ireland, September 18-20.
    

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.