Atlas home || Conferences | Abstracts | about Atlas

New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium 2000
November 26-29, 2000
Dept of Mathematics, University of Waikato
Hamilton, New Zealand

Organizers
Kevin Broughan, Rua Murray, Ernie Kalnins, Stephen Joe

View Abstracts
Conference Homepage

Why is Wool Crimping?
by
Bernie Tsang
University of Canterbury
Coauthors: Prof. Graeme Wake (University of Canterbury), Assoc. Prof. Bruce Robson (Lincoln University), Dr. Clive Marsh (WRONZ), Dr. David Cottle (WRONZ)

Bulk is one of the measurements of the quality of wool fibre and crimping, the curly property, of wool fibre is highly related to the amount of bulk. Wool crimping is considered to be caused by the imbalance between forces of different microfibrils in the cortical cells. It is affected by the pitch angles of microfibrils and the lateral contraction applied. A mathematical model is developed to simulate the mechanism and thereby find the resulting geometry of a wool fibre. This is obtained by minimizing the strain energy.

Date received: October 19, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caek-72.