COMPUTATIONAL STUDY OF FORMATION EFFECTS ON PAPER STRENGTH

An elastic-plastic continuum mechanical model is employed to study the significance of formation-like nonuniformity on the strength properti es of paper. The variability of local strains is computed for realisti c specimen sizes and shown to differ from the analytical approximation by Dodson. The decrease in strength with either increasing flocculati on intensity or increasing specimen size is studied in detail. When th e flocculation intensity is constant, the tensile strength of the mode l paper decreases to a finite limiting value for square specimens of i ncreasing size, but to zero for constant-width specimens of increasing length. At the same time the variability of local strains is almost t he same in the two cases.