Flexural behaviour of carbon and glass reinforced hybrid composite pipes

This paper presents a study on the flexural behaviour of hybrid composite pipes reinforced with carbon and glass fibres. The progressive failure of composite pipes in three point bending was modelled numerically by Finite Element Analysis (FEA). The FEA based model was validated against the experimental data. With this developed model, the effects of ply angle, fibre volume fraction and hybridisation have been found. It is shown from the results that the maximum bending loads occur when the ply angle is between 60 degrees and 75 degrees The hybrid composite pipe has comparable failure loads compared to the full carbon fibre composite pipe or the full glass fibre composite pipe.