STRESS ANALYSIS OF NON-CONVENTIONAL COMPOSITE PIPES - AN EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL APPROACH

This paper discusses an experimental and numerical study to investigate the failure behavior of non-conventional cross-sectioned fiber reinforced composite pipes filled with glass beads subjected to internal pressure and bending loads. An adaptive filament winder for non-conventional pipes was exclusively designed to fabricate the samples used in the experiments. Experiments were conducted on triangular and rectangular cross-sectioned samples as per ASTM standards to find the internal burst pressure, bending strength, and failure modes of the pipes. Numerical analysis for the pipe loading process has been developed based on the finite element method for a linear orthotropic problem for composite pipes. The finite element software ANSYS was used to build the model and predict the stresses imposed on the pipes. The relationships between the applied internal pressure and peak hoop stress, bending load, and bending strength with reference to the fillet radius were determined; and generally a good correlation was found between the experimental and numerical results.