Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer pultruded members: constitutive model and stability analysis

The increasingly widespread use of fiber-reinforced polymers as an alternative to conventional materials makes it necessary to formulate theoretical models which adequately evaluate the influence of the anisotropy of such composites on the structural behavior. While the cross section shapes adopted for compressed members are generally the same as in steel structures, the anisotropy which characterizes these polymers may reduce the critical loading threshold due to local buckling phenomena. A procedure to study the buckling of glass fiber reinforced polymer pultruded members by means of an homogenization approach is proposed here. A two-stage buckling model permits the determination of both global and local critical loads as explicit functions of the member geometry and its material behavior. These functions may be used for optimization of the shape of the above-mentioned members. Besides the model shows its reliability as it fits the results of experimental tests on members with different slenderness ratios. Keywords: Periodic functions; Constitutive models; Plates; Columns; Stability analysis; Bending moments.