Effect of water desorption on the rheology and dynamic response of human hair to a non-contact impact

Human hair is a non-homogeneous complex material made of keratin fibers oriented along the longitudinal axis which offer anisotropic mechanical properties. Nowadays, it is possible to measure the mechanical properties of hairs with the classical tests, but most often, these tests are destructive and make hard to measure the influence of some external factors or treatments on the behavior of a same hair fiber. In the current paper, vibrations induced by a non-contact impact have been utilized as a representative response of the mechanical behavior of hair. The characteristics of the vibratory response allow measuring the variation in the mechanical properties and the instantaneous effect of an external factor on the properties of a same sample. First, load relaxation tests have been performed on hair samples after moisturization and for different times of an air-drying process in order to characterize the change in the visco-elastic behavior of hair during the water desorption. Other hair samples have been tested with our non-contact impact and vibration technique in order to observe the change in the vibratory response during the water desorption. The vibratory response has then been correlated to the mechanical properties of the hair fiber.