 Unbonded material-fibre bundle

An unbonded material-fibre bundle collects separate material fibres without continuously bonding neighbouring strands together. Contact and friction may still transfer force, so unbonded does not automatically mean freely sliding. The response depends on which strands are gripped, their alignment, slack and whether inter-fibre sliding is permitted.

For straight strands of common length $L$, let both end fixtures impose the same small extension $\Delta L$ on every strand. Under linear elasticity, strand $i$ carries $F_i=E_i{A}_i\Delta L/L$, soThis follows by applying the uniform-bar axial stiffness relation to the strands in parallel.^[ref] Equal extension here is an end-loading condition. It does not require continuous bonding, nor does it describe the separate freely sliding bending experiment in bending rigidity of an unbonded fibre bundle.

The material cross-sectional area $A_m={\sum }_i{A}_i$ excludes gaps. An envelope enclosing the bundle can have larger area $A_e$. Define the bundle material area fraction $\varphi =A_m/A_e$. For identical moduli $E$, inferring a modulus from the envelope and the measured axial stiffness givesAs an original example, four circular strands of radius $0.10\mathrm{mm}$ have $A_m=0.12566\mathrm{m}{\mathrm{m}}^2$. Stipulate an envelope area $0.20\mathrm{m}{\mathrm{m}}^2$, $E=100\mathrm{GPa}$ and $L=50\mathrm{mm}$. Then $\varphi =0.6283$, $K_{\mathrm{ax}}=251.3\mathrm{N}\mathrm{m}{\mathrm{m}}^{-1}$ and $E_{\mathrm{envelope}}=62.83\mathrm{GPa}$. That lower effective value does not mean the strand material has changed.

A useful tensile comparison counts the engaged strands, measures their areas and checks that the fixtures actually impose the assumed extension. A loose or broken strand changes the load-bearing area even if the outer envelope barely changes. Individual strand properties can be characterized by a single-fibre tensile test; neither envelope dimensions nor a bundle slope alone identifies every strand's Young's modulus.