Tensile behaviour of nonwoven structures: comparison with experimental results

Nonwoven structures have been recently explored for numerous novel applications ranging from composites to scaffolds. The tensile property of nonwovens is a pre-requisite and indeed, one of the main parameters to determine their performance for such applications. In the first part, a modified micromechanical model describing the tensile behaviour of thermally bonded nonwovens was proposed by incorporating the effect of fibre re-orientation during the deformation (Rawal et al., J Mater Sci 45:2274, 2010). In this study, an attempt has been made to compare the theoretical and experimental stress–strain curves of thermally bonded and spunbonded nonwoven structures. These theoretical findings have been obtained from the most popular analytical tensile models of nonwovens available in the literature in addition to our modified tensile model. Poisson’s ratio has also been determined experimentally in order to predict the stress–strain behaviour of nonwoven, and its relationship with longitudinal strain has clearly distinguished between the randomly and preferentially orientated types of structures. In thermally bonded nonwovens, the tensile strength in various test directions is computed through pull-out stress and a comparison is made with the experimental results.