Analytical and experimental study on flexural behavior of pultruded fibre reinforced polymer sheet piles

Abstract

This paper presents the experimental and the analytical results of pultruded glass fiber reinforced polymer sheet pile panels subjected to flexural loading. Full scale four-point flexural tests were conducted up to failure on five sets of joined pairs of glass fiber reinforced polymer Z-pile panels by placing them flat-wise. The influences of transverse and longitudinal fiber volume fraction, span-to-depth ratio and steel plate on the carrying capacity and deformability were discussed. The test results displayed that increasing the fibre transverse and longitudinal volume fraction was helpful for tearing control at the flange-web junction on the compressive side, thus obviously enhancing the load capacity and the flexural rigidity of fiber reinforced polymer sheet pile panels. The additional steel plate improved the rigidity of fiber reinforced polymer sheet pile panels, but the load capacity increased insignificantly due to the debonding of steel and glass fiber reinforced polymer interface. The span-to-depth ratio has little influence on the ultimate load due to the local failure but large deformation occurred in the long-span specimen. Based on classical laminate theory for anisotropic materials, a new equation was proposed to calculate the flexural and shear rigidities of glass fiber reinforced polymer sheet pile panels with corrugated section, in addition to applying classical Timoshenko beam theory. The theoretical results agree well with those obtained from the experiments.