A Mechanistic Approach to the Modeling of the Fracture of Kevlar-29 Fiber in Recoil Compression

Abstract: The recoil compressive test, as introduced by Allen, has provided the closest results to the tra-ditional composites test for determining the compressive strength of high-performance polymers. Several methods have been developed to interpret the recoil compressive failure results, all of them involving ei-ther fitting empirical parameters or severely restricting the data pool. The model presented in this paper expands upon the idea of the recoil wave, providing a theoretical characterization of the single filament polymeric fiber under recoil compression. This characterization is expanded to postulate a mechanisti-cally derived model to accurately fit the fracture failure statistics of Kevlar-29 fiber that is shown to be both precise and highly insensitive to uncertainty in transverse modulus. Key Words: Kevlar, compression, modeling 1