Increasing Inter-Fiber Contact in the Altendorf-Jeulin Model

Abstract: In fields such as material design or biomedicine, fiber materials play an important role. Fiber simulations, also called digital twins, provide a basis for testing and optimizing the material's physical behavior digitally. Inter-fiber contacts can influence the thermal and mechanical behavior of a fiber system; to our knowledge, however, there exist no parametric fiber models allowing for explicit modeling of the number of inter-fiber contacts. Therefore, this paper proposes an extension of the iterative force-biased fiber packing by Altendorf & Jeulin. In this extension, we model the inter-fiber contacts explicitly and add another force to the force-biased packing to increase the number of contacts. We successfully validate the packing with respect to its parameter accuracy. Moreover, we show that the extension indeed increases the number of contacts, even exceeding theoretical values. Hence, this packing scheme has the potential to achieve higher accuracy in physical simulations.