Stiffness and buckling behavior of woven columns

Woven shell structures are beneficial for applications requiring lightweight, damage resilience, and design tunability, such as in wearable devices, soft robotics, and aerospace systems. A fundamental component of woven structures is the woven column. While the mechanical properties of a woven column can be determined using sophisticated finite element (FE) simulations, these FE models are computationally expensive and do not explain the underlying mechanics behind scaling relationships. In this work, we derive purely analytical models for the buckling load and stiffness of woven columns, and discuss the criteria that lead to different buckling modes of the woven columns. The simulated results based on our models closely match experimental data across various weave design parameters. This work advances our understanding of the mechanics of woven systems and serves as a baseline for the design of next-generation hierarchical structures and materials. • Analytical models derived from geometric assumptions predict properties of woven columns. • Parametric experimental study of vertical and horizontal weave parameters supports the model. • Buckling modes established by experiment depend on horizontal to vertical weaver width ratio.