Abstract
This is the first a series of papers on the cylindrical orthotropic thermal conductivity of spiral woven composites. The geometric characteristics of spiral woven composites are modelled in the present study. A single layer of spiral woven fabric is considered as a fundamental structure and used to develop representative models, including round disc and polygon ones. In these representative models, crimps, cross-sections, and radial and circumferential arrangements of yarns are illustrated by cosine and arc yarn shape functions. A trapezoidal unit cell extracted from a polygon model will provide the next project in the series, with basic geometric parameters to develop thermal models for determining the thermal conductivities of spiral woven composites.