Abstract:

This paper evaluates the effects of experimental speeds (22, 24 and 26 m/min) on woven fabrics' stress relaxation behaviour in a cylindrical form under constant torsional strain. Worsted woven fabrics were put under experimentation with identical specifications along the warp direction such as yarn density, fabric construction and fibre content, However the structural parameters were somewhat different in the weft direction. The experiments were conducted using the method established by Hezavehei, et.al (2011) and the stress relaxation behaviour of specimens at three speeds of a spiral shaft which can hold samples tightly in a cylindrical form and automatically rotate were investigated. According to the results obtained, with increasing the speed of fabric rotation around the main shaft, the quantity of stress relaxation percent decreases. The effect of experimental speed on the stress relaxation behaviour is differently reported for the warp and weft directions due to the variety of structures along each individual direction. Regarding this, the reduction in the torsional strain recovery of samples in the weft direction is significantly more than that in the warp direction. In fact, the stress relaxation behaviour is likely to be related to the physical and viscoelastic properties of fibre, yarn and fabric. Hence the experimental data were fitted with two well known viscoelastic models such as an ordinary Maxwell's and three component Maxwell's model with a parallel connected nonlinear spring. The results were fairly justified by curve fitting of experimental data with the three component Maxwell's model including a parallel connected nonlinear spring. Furthermore non-linear behaviour was observed from experimental validation with a remarkable correlation coefficient.