Experimental and modeling study of viscoelastic behaviour of woven dried jute under compressive stress

The liquid composite molding is a process of composite manufacturing, where all varieties involve compressive strain reinforcement before and during mold filling. A better understanding of the compressibility phenomenon helps to improve control of the implementation process of parts and tooling design. In this work, an experimental study of a series of compression tests was established in order to explain which effect influence the compression and relaxation phases during the manufacturing process, such as number of layers, compression speed, grammage, and jute layers orientations. A rheological approach was chosen to model the viscoelastic behaviour. The experimental results revealed that there are several molding parameters to take into account in manufacturing using liquid composite molding process, in the case of jute fibers. It was concluded that the Zener model is the optimal model to determine the compression and relaxation parameters.