Scattering of morphological and mechanical properties of flax fibres

Flax fibres can be considered as natural composites made of concentric layers in which cellulose microfibrils are embedded helicoidally in a polysaccharidic matrix. Since these fibres possess good mechanical properties and a low density, they are more and more foreseen as a plausible reinforcement material in polymer-matrix composites. In the present work hundreds of flax fibres were analysed in terms of their morphology (by image analysis) and mechanical behaviour (by tensile testing). The common feature between microstructure analyses and mechanical properties is the large scattering of the experimental values. Moreover, the correlation of the morphological analysis with the mechanical properties shows that the scattering of the microstructural figures at this scale of observation is not responsible for the scattering of the mechanical properties.