Manufacturing of fibreglass nonwoven webs using a paper making method and study of fibre orientation in these webs

Nonwovens are manufactured by different methods such as dry laying, wet laying, spunbonding and melt blowing. This paper discusses the processing of chopped fibreglass strands to form nonwoven webs using the wet laying process. Chopped fibreglass strands are used to manufacture fibreglass mats and also mixed with resins to form composites. In this project these strands were used to manufacture nonwoven webs by the wet laid method. Modification of the paper hand sheet making method was necessary at the stage of web formation and bonding in order to overcome problems caused by the stiffness and inert nature of glass fibres, as compared to pulp. The fibre orientation of the fibreglass webs was analysed using the Fast Fourier Transform, in which it was found that in most of the fibreglass webs, the fibres were oriented randomly.