Abstract

Air jet weaving, where the weft yarn is transported through the machine using air as propelling medium, is a popular weaving method due to its superior productivity, however at the cost of a high energy demand. The interactions between the weft yarn and the air jets are complex and not yet fully understood. Moreover, state-of-the-art techniques to simulate these interactions, are far from mature since the yarn is often simplified as a smooth and solid cylinder. Therefore, a novel multi-scale and multi-physics approach is proposed to simulate the interaction between weft yarns and air jets. Starting from microcomputed tomography (µCT) scans of a yarn used in air jet weaving, a high-fidelity microscale geometrical model is constructed, representing the yarn by its fibers. This geometrical model is used as input for microstructural simulations and will be used for flow simulations on microscale, where the aim is to extract local coefficients and as such characterize the yarn. These coefficients are then used as input for computationally cheap macroscale models, where the yarn is represented by its centerline containing the microscale properties. In a final stage, the macroscale structural and flow models will be coupled as to obtain a full FSI simulation of a weft insertion in an air jet loom. Current paper highlights the microscale geometry extraction of a fine wool fiber yarn of 28.8 tex. Consecutively, a computational framework is proposed to simulate the tensile behavior of this yarn, using the previously obtained microscale geometrical model. The resulting stress-strain curve of the yarn is compared to experiments and shows good correspondence.