Characterisation of the mechanical properties of pultruded fibre-reinforced polymer tube

This paper presents an investigation on the mechanical properties of pultruded fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) tube. Unlike typical FRP tube, the investigated tube has additional ±45° glass fibre reinforcement making it suitable for several structural applications. Tests on coupons and full-scale specimens were undertaken to determine the mechanical properties of the tube. Moreover, a finite element (FE) analysis was carried to simulate the compressive and flexural behaviours of full-scale specimen. Experimental results showed that coupon and full-scale specimens exhibited linearly elastic up to failure. The maximum variation of the experimental data is up to 8% indicating that the reproducibility of the test is quite reasonable and that the experimental procedures were conducted within the acceptable margin of error. The comparison between the compressive and flexural peak load values obtained experiment and FE methods revealed that their difference is less than 5%. Furthermore, the compressive and flexure failure modes obtained from the experiment were fairly simulated in the FE analysis. These indicated that FE analysis predicted reasonably the actual compressive and flexural behaviours of the pultruded FRP tube.