Uniaxial compression of three-dimensional entangled fibre networks: impacts of contact interactions

Journal article, 2018

This paper concerns uniaxial compression of anisotropic fibre network, as typically seen in the end use of nonwoven and textile fibre assemblies. The constitutive relationship and deformation mechanism have been investigated by using a bead-model to represent the complex structures of the constituent fibres and the fibre networks. The compression stress shows a power-law dependency on the density with a threshold density for both experimental and numerical fibre networks. Unlike the widely studied tri-axial compression of the initially isotropic network, it was found that the contact interaction between the fibres, especially the fibre-fibre contact stiffness (or the transverse compression properties of fibres), has a large impact on all the constitutive parameters. In particular, the exponent values computed based on the softer contact stiffnesses agreed very well with the experimental values reported in the literature. The internal deformation mechanism was similar to the earlier studies that at low compression, the deformation is dominated by the low-energy-mode deformations (i.e. bending and shear), whereas at higher compression, the difference appears: the compression of fibre-fibre contacts, instead of the deformation in the fibre axial direction, takes over.