Structural and Elastic Properties of Varieties of Cotton Fibers

The present study emphasizes appending the knowledge of structure-property relations, elasto-mechanical properties. The knowledge of the elasto-mechanical properties of cotton fibers plays a significant role in industrial applications, these properties determine the fabric stiffness, hardness, and tailorability of cotton. For various cotton samples studied here, whose molecular orientations were unknown, and few studies are reported to study its basic structural properties. However, the linked atom least square fit (LALS) and crystallographic tool PLATON has been utilized to obtain the crystal structure of LRA and Shankar cotton fibers using XRD data. The elastic constant matrix for the monoclinic unit cell with the lattice parameters a = 7.350 Å, b = 8.220 Å and c = 10.370 Å and γ = 96.28° has been obtained by considering Treloar’s assumptions. These elastic constants are incorporated to the ELATE tensor analysis tool along with the Voigt principle to evaluate elastic moduli. It is observed that the spatial variations of these elastic moduli deviate from the spherical shape, which shows the existence of the anisotropic property of the fibers. With all these structures and physicomechanical parameters analyzed for the cotton samples studied, the structure-property dependencies have been obtained utilizing the functional data analysis technique.