• This is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials.Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication.A definitive version was subsequently published in: Journal of the Me-

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Abstract:Thermal bonding is the fastest and cheapest technique for manufacturing nonwovens. Understanding mechanical behaviour of these materials, especially related to damage, can aid in design of products containing nonwoven parts. A finite-element model incorporating mechanical properties related to damage such as maximum stress and strain at failure of fabric's fibres would be a powerful design and optimization tool. In this study, polypropylene-based thermally bonded nonwovens manufactured at optimal processing conditions were used as a model system. A damage behaviour of the nonwoven fabric is governed by its single-fibre properties, which are obtained by conducting tensile tests over a wide range of strain rates. The fibres for the tests were extracted from the nonwoven fabric in a way that a single bond point was attached at both ends of each fibre. Additionally, similar tests were performed on unprocessed fibres, which form the nonwoven. Those experiments not only provided insight into damage mechanisms of fibres in thermally bonded nonwovens but also demonstrated a significant drop in magnitudes of failure stress and respective strain in fibres due to the bonding process. A novel technique was introduced in this study to develop damage criteria based on the deformation and fracture behaviour of a single fibre in a thermally bonded nonwoven fabric. The damage behaviour of a fibrous network within the thermally bonded fabric was simulated with a finite-element model consisting of a number of fibres attached to two neighbouring bond points. Additionally, various arrangements of fibres' orientation and material properties were implemented in the model to analyse the respective effects.

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Due to random orientation of fibres and presence of voids in their microstructure, lowdensity thermally bonded polymer-based nonwovens demonstrate complex processes of deformation and damage initiation and evolution. This paper aims to introduce a micro-scale discontinuous finite element model to simulate an onset of damage in low-density nonwovens. In the model, structural randomness of a nonwoven fabric was introduced in terms of orientation distribution function (ODF) obtained by an algorithm based on the Hough Transform. Fibres were represented in the model with truss elements with orientations defined according to the computed ODF. Another structural element of nonwovens -bond points-were modelled with shell elements having isotropic mechanical properties. The numerical scheme employed direct modelling of fibres at micro level, naturally introducing the presence of voids into the model and thus making it suitable for simulations of low-density nonwovens. The obtained results of FE simulations were compared with our data of tensile tests performed in principal directions until the onset of damage in the specimens.