Mechanical properties of woven fabric composite for stratospheric airship envelope based on stochastic simulation

Owing to the increased demand of long endurance flight, lightweight, and high strength envelope becoming the main point of the stratospheric airship design, especially the research on the envelope mechanical properties a novel stratospheric airship envelope material was developed in this paper. According to the structure of the woven fabric composite, nonlinearity and orthotropy are two main characteristics of the envelope. Uniaxial tensile test was performed to study the stress–strain curves of the envelope material. It is seen that the force–displacement curve can be divided into two significant nonlinear regions and three quasi-linear regions by the analysis of the test results. To analyze the force–displacement curve with different regions by the statistical method, Monte Carlo simulation based on the Ising model was developed. It is found that the simulation curves coincide well with the experiment curves both in the warp and weft directions. And the results show that parameters of the envelope material including fabric strength, functional layer strength, interfacial bonding strength, and so on, are the important factors affecting the mechanical properties and they decide the force–displacement curve shape.