Radial compressive behavior of hand-laid GFRP pipes: an experimental and numerical study

The growing interest in composite materials is due to their exceptional strength, stiffness, and fatigue resistance. Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) pipes are ideal for aerospace applications like drone arms, needing to withstand payload weight, forces, vibrations, environmental effects, impacts, altitude changes, air density variations, and extreme temperatures. This study investigates the compressive behavior under radial loading of GFRP pipes specifically fabricated with a six-ply laminate sequence [0/90/0/90/0/90]. An experimental evaluation was conducted using a universal testing machine according to standard ASTM D2412 to assess the compressive response, and the acquired data was subsequently validated through finite element method (FEM) employing Abaqus software. The percentage difference between the experimental and FEM results is 4.72%, indicating a strong correlation between the two. Experimental findings confirmed a compressive strength of 0.49 MPa and a maximum load capacity of 0.49 kN for the six-ply GFRP laminate. FEM analysis validated these results. Furthermore, the influence of varying the number of plies on the GFRP pipe was studied, and the results show an increasing strength trend with additional plies. As the number of plies increases from 6 to 15, the ultimate compressive strength, represented by the peak stress value on each curve, also increases. This research establishes GFRP pipes as a promising candidate for applications requiring lightweight and robust materials.