Withdrawal model for fiber motions in the tuft disentanglement

Tuft disentanglement involves the principal actions of opening and carding, which are essential processing in textile technology. In this article, tuft disentanglement is modeled as fiber withdrawal considering the fiber interactions within the tuft. Based on the reasonable tuft model, the kinematic constraints were constructed in the disentanglement considering the carding essence and fiber interactions. Combined with the dynamic equation, the state of the fibers can be solved as a linear complementarity problem due to the complementarity in the fiber interactions. The withdrawal forces verified the simulations, which capture the qualitative features of experiments. Also, the effect of the withdrawal parameters on disentanglement was studied. The simulation results showed that the withdrawal forces increased with increasing withdrawal velocities and decreasing gauge lengths. The simulation results are consistent with the experiments. The proposed computational framework can be extended for predicting the mechanical behaviors of other random fibrous materials involving fiber interactions.