Determination of bond strengths in non-woven fabrics: A combined experimental and computational approach

Non-wovens usually experience damage under external loading. Hence, a good understanding of damage mechanisms is of great value in designing new non-woven materials.

What did the Scientists Discover?

Inter-fiber bonds are important structural components in non-woven fabrics (Fig. a). Bond fracture is found as one major damage mechanism. In this work, we develop a combined experimental and computational approach to extract bond strength values.

We first cut a small piece of specimen and used micro computed tomography (mCT) to image its network structure (Fig. a). Next, we created a digital replica of this specimen based on the mCT geometry information and modeled it in a finite element framework (Fig. b). Bond properties were determined by matching finite element simulation predicted mechanical response to the experimental data. This proposed method is very efficient since it characterizes hundreds of bonds at the same time. It also has high accuracy which is confirmed by statistical analysis and other experimental methods.

Impact:

The manufacturing methods for non-woven are versatile, and the product carries advantages including high porosity, high surface area, and high specific toughness. Because of these positive attributes, non-wovens are utilized in a variety of fields including energy, water purification, ballistic protection, tissue engineering and medical disposables. Despite wide application, predicting non-woven strength and toughness remains a difficult task. The deformation process involves many micromechanical mechanisms, such as fiber stretching, fiber bending, fiber rotation and bond damage. Among these, bond damage is a major damage mechanism in many non-wovens, however, bond strength is rarely reported due to lack of an effective characterization technique.

In this research, the obtained inter-fiber bond properties provide valuable information to researchers who are interested in predicting large size non-woven mechanical behaviors. The mCT based numerical model can serve as a powerful tool to study structure-property relationships of fiber network materials.

Collaborators:

Naigeng Chen, Cornell University, Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
Meredith Silberstein, MN., Cornell University, Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Corresponding author email: ms2682@cornell.edu

Publication citation:

Chen, N., & Silberstein, M. N. (2017). Determination of Bond Strengths in Non-woven Fabrics: a Combined Experimental and Computational Approach. Experimental Mechanics, 1-13. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11340-017-0346-3

Funding: