If I understand well, you trying to make sandwich composite? Taking into consideration 'durability', cant imagine material's properties as it, so guess that E and Rm may be ok. If so, properties will depend on:
- how many layers of jute?
- what is E and Rm of jute and resin?
- how the angle between layers will change between layers?
If You will know below, you can simulate properties using (not so complicated) Van Fo Fy’s model to estimate properties.
Hello, the main drawback of natural fibers is their low thermal processing temperatures, that border around 200˚C, if you coat jute fibre with epoxy resin cured with appropriate curing agent at optimum concentration you may get improved degradation resistance and improved fluxural strength as well.
The flexural strength will be increased with increasing curing agent concentration that could be attributed to high crosslinking of flexible epoxy resulting in improved
strength of the fabric.
About durability, i can say that epoxy is expected to serve as a good compatibilizer between jute and polymer matrix in which it is supposed to be incorporated since it is situated in between them and it interacts positively with both, hence the durability will also be improved.
An inter phase between fibre and matrix can be formed in composites due to preferential adsorption of resin components onto the surface of the fibres, resulting in a gradient of cure and mechanical properties. The fibre surface treatment before introducing the matrix material can modify the interphase region and alter the adhesion between the fibre and the matrix.
Once you treat fibre with any one of the treatments (such as Alkali treatment, silane coupling agent and/or epoxy film former, the fibre will chemically bonded with the matrix.
I guess in your case you are using epoxy film former, this is nothing but epoxy dispersion which can be cured with monomeric amine (DETA/TETA) which are easily miscible with water.
The calculation of curing agent for epoxy is as follows;
weight of curing agent = (active hydrogen equivalent weight of amine/ epoxy equivalent weight)*100
In case of monomeric amine like DETA/TETA, active hydrogen equivalent weight can be calculated by dividing molecular weight of amine to number of replaceable hydrogen atom.