Non-woven fabrics are a cost-effective route to manufacture low density felts very efficient to stop fragments from an explosion. Short fibers are laid down into a mat, which is consolidated through thermal, mechanical or chemical mechanisms to induce bonds at filament crossover points, providing a self-sustaining structure. These non-woven fabrics were represented as a bidimensional network of straight fibers of finite length and whose orientation was given by a statistical function. Fibers intersections formed the nodes of the model and adjacent nodes were connected with rods that transferred load in the fiber direction. Additionally, spring elements were added to penalize the angle variation between crossing fibers at the nodes. Fibers were assumed to behave as non-linear elastic solids, whose constitutive equation took into account inelastic effects such as the initial reduced stiffness of wrinkled fibers, fiber buckling, fracture and fiber sliding. The in-plane mechanical behavior of the felt was computed using a finite element scheme that integrated the dynamic equilibrium equations using the Newmark algorithm under the large displacement assumption. The effect of felt density and fiber length and orientation was studied and the numerical results were compared with experimental data obtained a felt made up of polyethylene fibers.
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