Application of Digital Image Correlation to Study the Tensile Properties of Spacer Fabric

The importance of understanding three-dimensional spacer fabrics properties, is a reason to the development of rapid and accurate methods for determining properties, due to their numerous applications in various industries. In most applications, spacer fabrics are affected by tension; therefore, knowing their behaviour in the encounter with tension is important. The purpose of this paper is to investigate on deformation of the spacer fabric and determine the local displacements in this fabric under tension. So, the digital image correlation method was used, that is a usual method of determining the displacements and deformation of a structure under external loading. Deformation behaviour of the diamond shape unit the of spacer fabrics structure at different tensile strains, based on experimental observations and theoretical analysis using video processing and digital image correlation method was investigated in the course and wale direction. The fabric unit deformation, the distribution of the local displacements and longitudinal and transverse strain of fabric were determined using video processing and compared with experimental method. Comparison of results showed that video processing method is able to calculate the local displacement in fabric and predict the longitudinal and transverse strain at different tensile strains with an error coefficient less than 10%.