Mechanical properties of sintered and non sintered stainless steel wools: experimental investigation and modeling

Entangled fibrous materials have a common point with cellular solids: the architecture is at the millimetric scale. However, they present one extra degree of freedom which is the connectivity on the constituents: while compressing a fibrous structure, the number of contacts between fibers is variable, by contrast to cellular solids where the building lock is the cell. In this respect, fibrous entangled solids can span a whole range of mechanical behavior depending on the possibility offered to fibers to create new contacts: from the felt where they are totally free, to the fully sintered wool where their relative motion is constrained by irreversible contacts. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanical properties of this class of materials, based on micro tomography observations for the number of contacts, and on a physically based model for fiber bending and collective reorganization. The material studied is a stainless steel wool. The properties investigated are the loading curves for sintered and non sintered wools. Qualitative differences introduced by sintering motivate a modification of the classical Toll model, which will be presented together with the experimental results.