Testing of single natural fibres: toward high-performance sustainable products

Purpose and goal

Natural fibres have many advantages. Most previous work studied the effects of water vapor on the composite or macroscopic level, which is a slow, expensive, and often gives inaccurate results. In this project we developed a micromechanical platform for accurate testing of single natural fibres, including wood fibres, under variable humidity levels. This platform can provide both sufficient data for good statistics and enough details for fundamental understanding of various mechanisms.

Expected results and effects

We have developed a platform and related protocol to test single natural fibres fast. We largely improved the testing throughput compared to the widely used method. We expect that this method can be used to fast screening of chemical modifications of natural fibres. Additionally, the obtained mechanical properties on the single fibres level can be used for high fidelity computational materials model. All these effects lead to better use of natural fibres, contributing to sustainability.

Planned approach and implementation

We have developed a testing platform and a protocol to test single natural fibres fast. The platform is built on a Kammrath Weiss tensile tester with a hypersensitive load cell with force sensitivity down to 10 N. We came up with two major innovations: i) we designed the sample mounting tabs using aluminum (Al) foil instead of paper, which largely increases the success rate of testing. ii) we developed a fast method to measure the cross-section areas of individual natural fibres.