Description

The handling of long, flexible fibers suspended in airflow is of great interest to research, development and production in various fields, e.g. composite materials, biotechnology, paper and fashion industry. The application at hand comes in particular from the textile manufacturing. In the melt-spinning process of non-woven materials, hundreds of individual endless fibers being obtained by continuous extrusion of a melted polymer are stretched and entangled by highly turbulent air flows to finally form a web. The quality of this web and the resulting non-woven material depends essentially on the dynamics of the fibers. To gain knowledge about the turbulence effects on the fiber motion, it is necessary to treat fiber-fluid interactions and particularly to determine the aerodynamic force on the fiber.