Verification of multi-axial damage in Glass Fibre-Reinforced Polymer laminates by progressive failure analysis for Civil Engineering applications

The use of Glass Fibre-Reinforced Polymer as a building material in structures or structural components is on the rise. Standards such as CUR96, DNV and JRC provide a basis of design with the material. However, there is a lack of confidence in the design phase with structures made of Glass Fibre-Reinforced Polymer, resulting in the use of large safety factors causing the components to be bloated in size. At the time of writing this report, the technical committee, CEN/TC 250 (responsible for developing structural Eurocodes), establishes a technical design specification for Fibre-Reinforced Polymer (FRP) structures. This technical specification describes a simplified and linear criterion to determine the capacity of a GFPR Laminate, in addition to being open for the use of Progressive Failure Analysis (PFA). However, the simplified and linear criterion is overly conservative, whereas there is a lack of faith in the use of the PFA considering the failure theories and degradation models that are currently in use. This report discusses the PFA, a non-linear, 5-step, advanced 2D analysis model, that can predict the static strength of in-plane stress dominated Glass Fibre-Reinforced Polymer laminate, with an arbitrary lay-up composition, based on existing knowledge and experiments, including the damage development under multi-axial stress states and stress redistribution. The research is limited to in-plane behavior, under tensile and compressive stresses. The static material response is characterized on a unidirectional ply level based on principal directions and based on experimental results obtained from the OptiDat program. The response predicted by the PFA for both tension and compression was in reasonable agreement with the experimental results. However, depending on the failure theory and degradation model used, there is potential for optimistic predictions of the laminate stress capacity. For future work, it is recommended to continue the research on a larger vari
Civil Engineering