A co-rotational grid-based model for fabric drapes

Abstract

Fabric drapes are typical large displacement, large rotation and small strain problems. Compared to conventional geometric non-linear shell analyses, computational fabric drape analysis is particularly challenging due to the extremely weak bending rigidities of fabrics. Compared to continuum shell finite element methods, grid- or particle-based methods appear to be more successful in high drapeability problems. The latter methods often resort to simple particle mechanics and formulate the elastic energy in terms of the inter-particle distances and trigonometrical functions of the angles between the straight lines joining adjacent particles. In this paper, the co-rotational approach and commonly employed assumptions for small strain problems in finite element analysis will be adopted to formulate the elastic energy. It will be seen that the internal force vector and the stiffness matrix are considerably simpler than other grid-based models, yet the sparsity of the tangential stiffness matrix remains unchanged. A number of examples are considered and the predicted results are promising. © 2003 John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.