THE TENSILE TESTING OF INDIVIDUAL WOOD FIBERS USING ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING ELECTRON-MICROSCOPY AND VIDEO IMAGE-ANALYSIS

Relationships between virgin fiber types, fiber production techniques and mechanical properties are well understood and documented. For recycled fibers, however, these same relationships are confounded by unquantified degrees of further mechanical and chemical damage. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of recycling on secondary fibers, the potentially deleterious effect of recycling upon fiber mechanical properties must be quantified. In this study, individual fibers-both recycled and virgin-were tested in tension with an environmental scanning electron microscope. Failure characteristics of both recycled and virgin fibers are reported. The influence of both natural and processing induced gross defects were seen to be highly influential in controlling mechanical behavior. The importance of defects and the implications for modeling the behavior of fibers is explained.