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 recy cled fibers, however, these same relationships are confounded by unqua ntified degrees of further mechanical and chemical damage. To gain a m ore comprehensive understanding of the impact of recycling on secondar y fibers, the potentially deleterious effect of recycling upon fiber m echanical properties must be quantified. In this study, individual fib ers-both recycled and virgin-were tested in tension with an environmen tal scanning electron microscope. Failure characteristics of both recy cled and virgin fibers are reported. The influence of both natural and processing induced gross defects were seen to be highly influential i n controlling mechanical behavior. The importance of defects and the i mplications for modeling the behavior of fibers is explained.