Computational analysis of physico-mechanical properties of cotton fibers using elastic tensor analysis tool

The harm that has been caused to the climate because of the broad usage of synthetic materials has incited the improvement and use of natural fiber materials. This study is an endeavor to investigate the underlying physico-mechanical properties of few cotton fibers which are cultivated across India, USA, and Ukraine. Powder X-ray diffraction data of considered fibers were acquired and utilized along with statistical tools to get their physico-mechanical properties. The chosen materials belong to monoclinic unit cell with lattice parameters a=7.350 Å, b=8.220 Å, c=10.370 Å and β=96.28°. The XRD has been refined using FullProf software package and obtained the crystallographic information file. Trealor's principle has been employed to obtain the 6 × 6 elastic constants for a monoclinic crystal system. These elastic constants were employed to open-source Elastic Tensor Analysis Tool (ELATE) and spatial dependence of elastic moduli were plotted and observed that, the USA cotton has significant mechanical properties compared to Indian and Ukraine cotton. This method can be extended to any material of interest to compute the physicomechancial properties. (author)