Measurement of tensile mechanical properties of fiber reinforced plastic rebars by 3D digital image correlation

Abstract

Abstract Fiber reinforced plastic (FRP) plays an increasingly important role in many engineering fields due to its advantages of light weight, low cost, simple maintenance, and excellent corrosion resistance. The conventional contact methods for deformation measurement, such as strain gauge and mechanical extensometer, have some shortcomings in measuring the strain of FRP rebar specimens with spiral curved surfaces. Therefore, the non-contact three-dimensional digital image correlation (3D-DIC) technique was employed to determine the tensile mechanical properties of two types of FRP rebar specimens, i. e. glass FRP (GFRP) and carbon FRP (CFRP) specimens. Uniaxial tensile tests with three different loading rates were conducted to obtain the stress-strain curves, elastic modulus, tensile strength and percentage total extension at maximum force of these two FRP specimens. Experimental results indicate that the axial-strain field of all FRP rebar specimens present nonuniform distribution and that the stress of GFRP and CFRP rebars varies linearly with the strain. Moreover, no yielding phenomenon was observed from the stress-strain curves, which indicates that both GFRP and CFRP rebars belong to the group of typical brittle materials. The dispersion of elastic moduli obtained using 3D-DIC is better than that using a clip-on extensometer, which demonstrates the validity of 3D-DIC for the determination of tensile mechanical properties of FRP rebars with spiral curved surfaces.