An experimental and numerical study of the behaviour of glass fibre reinforced plastics (GRP) short columns at elevated temperatures

This paper presents the results of experimental and numerical studies to determine the compression strength of short glass reinforced plastic (GRP) C-shaped channels at different elevated temperatures. Several possible compressive testing methods were explored to obtain the compression strength of the material. Eventually a pair of grooved steel end plates was used to restrain the test specimen under compression. Using the measured longitudinal compressive strengths of the material from this study and the measured longitudinal Young modulus from a previous study by the same research group, a numerical modelling study utilising the commercial finite element package ABAQUS has been performed to simulate the compressive behaviour of the test columns at elevated temperatures. Estimation of other material properties has been made to enable the numerical simulations. Comparison between the numerical and test results confirms that it is suitable to use ABAQUS and the adopted material properties to model GRP columns at elevated temperatures.