Explicit local buckling analysis and design of fiber–reinforced plastic composite structural shapes

Pultruded fiber–reinforced plastic (FRP) composite structural shapes (beams and columns) are thin-walled open or closed sections consisting of assemblies of flat plates and commonly made of E-glass fiber and either polyester or vinylester resins. Due to high strength-to-stiffness ratio of composites and thin-walled sectional geometry of FRP shapes, buckling is the most likely mode of failure before material failure. In this paper, explicit analyses of local buckling of rectangular orthotropic composite plates with various unloaded edge boundary conditions (i.e., (1) rotationally restrained along both unloaded edges (RR), and (2) one rotationally restrained and the other free along the unloaded edges (RF)) and subjected to uniform in-plane axial action at simply-supported loaded edges are first presented. A variational formulation of the Ritz method is used to establish an eigenvalue problem, and explicit solutions of plate local buckling coefficients in term of the rotational restraint stiffness (k) are obtained. The two cases of rotationally restrained plates (i.e., the RR and RF plates) are further treated as discrete plates of closed and open sections, and by considering the effect of elastic restraints at the joint connections of flanges and webs, the local buckling of different FRP shapes under uniform axial compression is studied. The approximate expressions of the rotational restraint stiffness (k) for various common FRP sections are provided, and their application to sectional local buckling predictions is illustrated. The explicit local buckling formulas of rotationally restrained plates are validated with the exact transcendental solutions. The analytical predictions for local buckling of various FRP profiles based on the present discrete plate analysis and considering the elastic restraints of the flange–web connections are in excellent agreements with available experimental results and finite element eigenvalue analyses. A design guideline for local buckling prediction and related performance improvement is proposed. The present explicit formulation can be applied effectively to determine the local buckling capacities of composite plates with elastic restraints along the unloaded edges and can be further used to predict the local buckling strength of FRP shapes.