Rapid and effective methods for the screening of flax fibres for composite applications

The effect of technical flax fibre fineness, purity and strength on the composite performance was investigated in order to provide screening methods to assess the suitability of the fibres for composite applications. Fineness significantly affects the transverse flexural strength of unidirectional composites while the effect of fineness and purity on the tensile performance is limited. It was also found that properties extracted from single fibre tensile tests on flax fibres do not correlated with back-calculated properties from composite tests. It is therefore advised to use composite testing rather than relying on tests on single technical fibres or fibre bundles to predict the composite performance of the fibres.