Research Article

Numerical modelling of hygro-mechanical behavior of Rhecktophyllum Camerunense vegatable fibers

¹ Laboratory of Mechanic, University of Douala Cameroon, Douala, Cameroon
² National Higher Polytechnic Institute, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Universality of Bamenda Cameroon, Bamenda, Cameroon

^* e-mail: borisnoutegomo@yahoo.fr; noutegomo@gmail.com

Received: 31 August 2023
Accepted: 20 August 2024

Abstract

Indeed the influence of humidity on the mechanical behavior of Rhecktophyllum Camerunense (RC) vegatable fiber was studied using numerical modelling and simulation. This method was used to investigate the hygromechanical caracteristics of the vegetable fiber that should be difficult to obtain experimentally. Another goal is to compare the results obtained experimentally and analytically in others works. The Finite Element Analysis using ANSYS sofware enables us to discretize a continuous problem and obtain an approximated solution. The Modeling Geometry adopted was an assembly of three concentric cylinders representing the sublayers S1, S2 and S3 of the fiber. The numerical model developed is a decoupled hygromechanical model. Thus the first stage of this model concerns the consideration of hygroscopy by simulating the diffusion of water within the material. Secondly, the mechanical calculation is carried out by taking as loading the results of the purely hygroscopic calculation, expressed in the form of hygroscopic fields. Identification of input parameters for the numerical simulation was found in literature. The results coroborated with the ones of literature and shown that humidity decrease the mechanical properties of RC vegetable fiber.