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Meso-scale deformation and damage in thermally bonded nonwovens

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posted on 2015-03-13, 15:54 authored by Farukh Farukh, Emrah DemirciEmrah Demirci, Memis Acar, Behnam Pourdeyhimi, Vadim SilberschmidtVadim Silberschmidt
Thermal bonding is the fastest and the cheapest technique for manufacturing nonwovens. Understanding mechanical behaviour of these materials, especially related to damage, can aid in design of products containing nonwoven parts. A finite element (FE) model incorporating mechanical properties related to damage such as maximum stress and strain at failure of fabric’s fibres would be a powerful design and optimisation tool. In this study, polypropylene-based thermally bonded nonwovens manufactured at optimal processing conditions were used as a model system. A damage behaviour of the nonwoven fabric is governed by its single-fibre properties, which are obtained by conducting tensile tests over a wide range of strain rates. The fibres for the tests were extracted from the nonwoven fabric in a way that a single bond point was attached at both ends of each fibre. Additionally, similar tests were performed on unprocessed fibres, which form the nonwoven. Those experiments not only provided insight into damage mechanisms of fibres in thermally bonded nonwovens but also demonstrated a significant drop in magnitudes of failure stress and respective strain in fibres due to the bonding process. A novel technique was introduced in this study to develop damage criteria based on the deformation and fracture behaviour of a single fibre in a thermally bonded nonwoven fabric. The damage behaviour of a fibrous network within the thermally bonded fabric was simulated with a FE model consisting of a number of fibres attached to two neighbouring bond points. Additionally, various arrangements of fibres’ orientation and material properties were implemented in the model to analyse the respective effects.

Funding

We greatly acknowledge support by the Nonwovens Cooperative Research Centre of North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA. Fiber Visions, USA generously provided the material for this study. We also acknowledge the use of Photron (Fastcam SA3), borrowed from the EPSRC UK Engineering Instrument Pool.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

JOURNAL OF MATERIALS SCIENCE

Volume

48

Issue

6

Pages

2334 - 2345 (12)

Citation

FARUKH, F. ... et al, 2013. Meso-scale deformation and damage in thermally bonded nonwovens. Journal of Materials Science, 48 (6), pp. 2334 - 2345.

Publisher

© Springer Science+Business Media

Version

  • SMUR (Submitted Manuscript Under Review)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2013

Notes

This article was published in the Journal of Materials Science [© Springer Science+Business Media]. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10853-012-7013-y

ISSN

0022-2461

Language

  • en

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