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Notch Sensitivity and Fracture Resistance of Non-woven Felts
Last modified: 2012-10-03
Abstract
Non-woven felts are made of networks of individual fibers or fiber bundlesdeposited over a planar surface. Bonds between fibers are introduced by means ofmechanical needles, thermal fusion or chemical bonds to increase the stiffness andstrength of nonwovens. An experimental and computational study of the notchsensitivity of a glass fiber non-woven felt is presented here. To this end, tensiletests were carried out on unnotched and notched specimens. The dominant failuremechanism was fiber-fiber bond rupture and damage was localized in a narrowzone close to the notch tip, whose size was limited by the fiber length. Thefracture behavior was simulated using the finite element method with AbaqusExplicit. Fibers were modeled using standard beam elements and bonds betweenfibers were taken into account using connector elements. The numericalpredictions of the notch sensitivity were compared with experimental results andshowed the potential of computational mechanics to accurately reproduce thedamage pattern and the failure strength.
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