Pressure Carrying Capacity of Reinforced Plastic Tubes

Abstract

The effect of the reinforcement of plastic tubes by composite material layers on the internal pressure carrying capacity has been investigated throughout this project. Basic plastic tubes, composite tubes and reinforced plastic tubes, by filament fibers and woven roving glass composite material, with one and two layers under internal pressure have been tested experimentally. Internal pressure has been applied for the various composite tubes including the plastic reinforced tubes using a hydraulic cylinder mechanism to obtain the bursting pressure needed for each case. Composite tubes of 48 mm inner diameter and of one and two layers were fabricated and tested throughout this project. In addition plastic tubes of 48 mm outer diameter and 1 mm wall thickness were tested with and without external layers of composite material. For all the tubes, filament winding and woven roving glass types of fibers were used. All the tubes tested were of 300 mm length. It has been found that the bursting pressure increases as the number of composite layers increases. The bursting pressure for one layer of woven roving tube gives about 42.8% higher than one layer of filament winding tube while the bursting pressure for two layers of filament winding tube gives about 16.3% higher than two layers of woven roving tube. It also shows that the bursting pressure for the plastic tube reinforced by two layers of filament winding is about 19.8% higher than that for the plastic tube reinforced by two layers of woven roving while the bursting pressure for the plastic tube reinforced by one layers of filament winding is about 7.8% higher than that for the plastic tube reinforced by one layers of woven roving. It has also been obtained that plastic tubes externally reinforced by layers of composite materials could stand 9.16–9.90 and 13.94–17.4 times, in terms of pressure, for one and two layers respectively.