The draping and buckling of woven fabric are simulated with the finite element method based on the micro-mechanical constitutive model and orthotropic constitutive model under gravity load. Compared with the traditional orthotropic mechanical model of the fabric, the micro-mechanical constitutive model characterizes the special properties of woven fabric due to its micro-weaving structures. The woven fabric sheet is discretized with 8-nodes shell elements which are designed for finite deformation and suffice to describe the large rotation of fabric sheet during draping, for the sake of simplicity, the nodes of the fabric sheet on the edges of the desk are assumed to be fixed. Compared with the experimental ones, the simulation results with the micro-mechanical constitutive model are in good agreement with the observations. The work paves the way for developing a virtual clothes trial system.

In order to improve the computing precision and computing efficiency of strength of woven composite material, the strength of woven composite material based on multi-scale finite element method (MsFEM) is simulated. The periodical boundary conditions are applied to the finite element method analyses to ensure stress continuous and strain continuous on boundary surfaces. The method can efficiently capture the large scale behavior of the solution without resolving all the small scale features by constructing the multi-scale finite element base functions that are adaptive to the local property of the differential operator. The characteristic difference between MsFEM and the conventional finite element method is attributed to base function. The applications demonstrate that the advantages of the multi-scale finite element method for numerical simulation of strength problem of woven composite material, i.e. significantly reducing computational efforts, and improving the accuracy of the solutions.

The draping and buckling of knitted fabric is simulated based on the micro-mechanical constitutive model with full Lagrange finite element method under gravity load. The micro-constitutive model reveals the mechanical properties of fabric more elaborately, especially fabric has its own properties owing to its micro-knitted structure. In the finite element analysis, the knitted fabric sheet is discretized with 8-node shell elements and reduced-integration method is used. The simulated results are in good agreement with the experimental observations. The work provides a theoretical and technical basis for the development of the virtual trial system of garments.