Influence of Polyester Resin Treatment on Jute Fabrics for Geotextile Applications

Abstract

In this study, jute woven fabrics (1 × 1 plain, twill, zigzag and diamond weave) were manufactured from 100% raw jute yarn. The fabric specimens were treated by 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 25% unsaturated polyester resin where styrene mo-nomer used as a solvent and 1% methyl ethyl ketone peroxide (MEKP) was used as initiator. Two bar pressure was applied for complete wetting of the fabric by a Padder and curing was done at 130˚C for 10 minutes. The physico-mechanical characteristics of untreated and treated samples were examined and evaluated. It was revealed that moisture content (MC) and water absorbency of the treated specimens were decreased with the increase of resin percentage (%) in the fa-brics. MC and water absorbency were maximum decreased up to 50.23% and 60.14% respectively by 25% resin treatment. On the other hand, bending length (BL), flexural rigidity (FR), flexural modulus (FM) and tensile strength (TS) were enhanced with the increase of resin percentage in the fabrics which re-sulted higher fabric stiffness. The maximum improvement of BL, FR, FM and TS were found to be 6.67%, 56.04%, 10.57% and 18.75% respectively in compar-ison to untreated sample. Soil degradation tests exhibited that 33.59% TS loss occurred for untreated specimens where only 8.04% loss of TS found for 25% resin treated one. Furthermore, jute based twill, zigzag and diamond fabrics were also treated by 10%, 15%, 20% and 25% resin, then measured their TS and compared with plain fabrics. It was revealed that plain fabrics have superior TS over other fabrics. It was also evident that TS enhanced for all the fabrics after resin treatment and maximum increase found for all the fabrics up to 25% resin treatment.