Abstract:

Since nonwoven fabric is widely used in the application of high performance geotextiles, its creep behaviour is essential to be evaluated. In this paper, the creep response of nonwven fabric was studied by using four mechanical models including the one-term generalised Kelvin model, Burger’s model, two-term generalised Kelvin model and Zurek’s model. To verify the feasibility of the models, creep experiments for nonwoven fabric were conducted, and the data were fitted by the four models, respectively, to obtain their parameter values using the Marquardt algorithm for nonlinear regression. When comparing the experimental creep curves with those fitted from the mechanical models, it is obvious that the experimental data was best fitted by Burger’s model. Also, since the residual sum of squares is far less than that of the GK (n = 1) and GK (n = 2) model and the squares of the correlation coefficient are near to unity, it can be concluded that Burger’s model is suitable to describe the creep behaviour of nonwoven fabric. Therefore the viscoelastic model verified can be adopted to predict the creep elongation of nonwoven fabrics.