Finite Element Analysis of Piping Composite Joints under Bending Load

This paper investigates the flexural behavior of metal pipe adhesive joints reinforced by composite laminate. In this study the effects of overlap length, adhesive thickness and fiber orientation on ultimate flexural strength are investigated. Finite element analysis is performed by coupling ABAQUS/Explicit and Python script. Python script creates parameters of the variables to run the analysis throughout the variables space without having the pre-processing in each iteration. It is shown that proper fiber angles would cause a more uniform stress distribution in the adhesive zone and would delay the failure. The results also show that increasing the overlap length improves the ultimate flexural strength non-linearly and the gradient is reduced by increasing length. It was concluded that there is an effective adhesive thickness that beyond that, the ultimate flexural strength is reduced by increasing the thickness.