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

The recoil compressive test, as introduced by Allen, has provided the closest results to the traditional 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 either 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 mechanistically 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.