Abstract
Glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) composites are promising alternatives for the traditional carbon steel pipes used in the oil and gas industry due to their corrosion and chemical resistance. However, the out-of-plane mechanical properties of GFRPs still need further improvement to achieve this goal. Hence, in this work, two methods combining either vacuum mixing or spray coating with vacuum-assisted resin infusion were studied to fabricate graphene nanoplatelet (GNP)/GFRP hybrid composites. The former method resulted in a severe filtering effect, where the GNPs were not evenly distributed throughout the final composite, whereas the latter process resulted in a uniform GNP distribution on the glass fabrics. The addition of GNPs showed no modest contribution to the tensile performance of the GFRP composites due to the relatively high volume and in-plane alignment of the glass fibers. However, the GNPs did improve the flexural properties of GFRP with an optimal loading of 0.15 wt% GNPs, resulting in flexural strength and modulus increases of 6.8 and 1.6%, respectively. This work indicates how GNPs can be advantageous for out-of-plane mechanical reinforcement in fiber-reinforced composites.
Highlights
Glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) composite has been increasingly investigated as an alternative piping material to carbon steel for oil and gas industry applications, owing to its lightweight, high specific strength and stiffness, good chemical and thermal resistance, ease of transportation, installation, and minimal maintenance (Edwards, 1998; Rafiee, 2016; Al-Samhan et al, 2017)
All images show river lines caused by the brittle fracture of the thermoset resin (Hull, 1999; Olowojoba et al, 2017), with the crack deflection and pull-out contributed by the embedded graphene nanoplatelet (GNP) (Johnsen et al, 2007; Bindu et al, 2014; Eqra et al, 2015; Domun et al, 2017; Hu et al, 2020), which are beneficial to the composite toughening
This work studied two different methods for GNP/GFRP hybrid composite fabrication, firstly in which vacuum mixing was accompanied by direct vacuum assisted resin infusion (VARI), resulting in a severe filtering effect of the GNPs
Summary
Glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) composite has been increasingly investigated as an alternative piping material to carbon steel for oil and gas industry applications, owing to its lightweight, high specific strength and stiffness, good chemical and thermal resistance, ease of transportation, installation, and minimal maintenance (Edwards, 1998; Rafiee, 2016; Al-Samhan et al, 2017). The recent requirement of moving the offshore oil and gas industry from shallow coast to “deep water” production (Hale et al, 2000) challenged the traditional steel tether design: larger platforms are needed to withstand high axial tension mechanics for works deeper than 1500 m. Lightweight materials, such as nonmetallic composites, are urgently needed for “deep water” applications (Ochoa and Salama, 2005), as well as other applications in demanding environments. Graphene and its derivatives have been extensively studied since its first isolation in GNP/GFRP Hybrid Composites
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