Abstract: The purpose of this study was to study failure mechanism and to investigate anisotropic behavior based on the woven fabric reinforced double-layer flexible composite under uni-axial tension loading. In this paper, the tensile strength under complex stress condition was obtained, the failure mechanism was analyzed, and the validity of failure criterion was investigated. The results showed that anisotropic behavior of the tested flexible composite is more than woven fabric reinforced architectural membrane. The prediction values of Harmonic cosine series failure criterion are in good agreement with those by experiments, compared with Tsai-Hill failure criterion. The result also revealed that the variation of performance indicators with off-axial angle was not in phase.

Key words: woven fabric, flexible composite, anisotropy, Tsai-Hill failure criterion, harmonic cosine, series criterion