A novel composite sandwich structure made up of glass fibre composite skins and modified phenolic core material has been developed for civil engineering applications. The satisfactory performance of this composite sandwich material as structural panels in several building and residential projects has shown the possibility of using this material in the development of structural beams. As these composite sandwich panels are manufactured in limited thicknesses, the structural beam section could be attained by gluing a number of sandwich panels together in the flatwise or edgewise positions. An experimental study of the flexural behaviour of the glue-laminated (glulam) composite sandwich beams with different orientations of sandwich laminations was evaluated to determine the most effective use of this composite material for structural beam applications. The effects of wrapping the glulam sandwich beams with one-layer of tri-axial glass fibres on the flexural behaviour were also examined.The glulam sandwich beams with edgewise laminations showed better structural performance compared to the beams with flatwise laminations due to the introduction of the vertical fibre composite skins. The glulam beams with edgewise sandwich laminations failed with 25% higher bending strength and almost similar bending stiffness than beams with flatwise laminations. The glulam sandwich beams with fibre wraps behaved slightly stiffer compared to the sandwich beams without wraps. In addition, the presence of fibre wraps prevented the immediate failure of the glulam beams which resulted in a higher strength and more ductile failure behaviour.
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