The effect of steric hindrance on the packing of elongated objects

Abstract

Fibres of various materials can be deposited to form planar mats of fibres. These kinds of structures have gained substantial attention owing to their direct relation to both large industrial fields, such as paper and nonwovens, and biological structures, such as natural networks of fibrin, actin and collagen. In addition, similar structures are important in new emerging fields such as flexible electronics and tissue engineering. The physical properties of these structures are directly related to the connectivity of the network, thus a thorough understanding of the contact formation of the system is of great importance from both a scientific viewpoint as well as for its application in the engineering of such structures. In this Thesis we extend on the work regarding the structure of such random networks by considering, in more detail, the effect of the steric hindrance between the constituents. Most notably, we find that even if the effect on averaged properties in many cases can be negligible, its effect on statistical properties of the contact formation remains substantial even for dilute systems.