A study on compression-induced morphological changes of nonwoven fibrous materials

Pore size is a characteristic parameter that is often defined for fibrous materials used in industrial applications. While there exist many available studies on the pore size distribution of different fibrous materials, the influence of compression load on pore size distribution has not been studied well. Studying the behavior of fibrous materials under compression is important especially because in many applications these materials are subjected to some degree of compression during use. In this work, we present a novel image-based modeling technique to study the changes in the pore size distribution of a fibrous material exposed to compressive load. This was made possible by building a miniature compression cell, and imaging the structure of a hydroentangled fabric under varying levels of compression. The 3D images obtained with Digital Volumetric Imaging were utilized to study the pore size distribution of the material and develop an empirical correlation as a function of compressive stress for these structures. This new correlation indicates that the mean pore diameter of a nonwoven material decreases exponentially with increasing the compressive stress.