Assessment of the Ultimate Compressive Strength for FRP Plates with Geometrical Imperfections

摘要

A parametric study is performed to investigate the effects of initial geometric imperfections on the ultimate compressive strength of square and long FRP plates. The study is performed for breadth to thickness ratios between 10 and 50 (approximately) for three alternative layup configurations. Initial geometric imperfections from the preferred buckling shapes are adopted with variation of their magnitude up to 3% of the panel width. The progressive failure model developed for the analyses adopts an instantaneous degradation technique for the damaged properties and incorporates the Tsai-Wu failure criterion for the onset of failure. Alternative failure methodologies are considered for the validation of the numerical model which is performed against experimental data from long and square panel tests available in the literature.