Failure mechanism of hybrid fiber networks

Fiber network material is a kind of multifunctional lightweight material which exists widely and has important application prospect. At present, researches mainly focus on networks consisting of one type of fibers. However, in practice, most fiber networks are hybrid fiber networks composed of fibers with different properties, which have larger performance and function design space but more complex failure mechanism. In order to further improve the mechanical properties of fiber networks, it is very important to study the failure process and failure mechanism of hybrid fiber networks. Therefore, the hybrid fiber network model was established in this paper to take account of both the mechanical properties of fibers and the inter-fiber connections. Based on the model, the failure process of hybrid fiber networks was systematically studied, and the effects of the fiber mixture ratio, the strength of inter-fiber connections and the total fiber volume fraction were analyzed. The results show that for typical hybrid fiber networks, there are three failure modes: inter-fiber connection dominated failure, inter-fiber connection and fiber co-dominated failure, and fiber dominated failure, with the variation of fiber mixture ratio. When the failure is co-dominated by the connection and fiber damages, the damages disperse throughout the network, and the network presents better toughness and strength. Therefore, the design space of mechanical properties of hybrid fiber network is much larger than that of networks consisting of only one type of fibers, and the hybrid network exhibits a wider application prospect.