EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON OUTSIDE FILAMENT WINDING REINFORCED FRP BRIDGE DECKS

ABSTRACT: Innovated FRP (Fiber Reinforced Polymer) bridge deck system is gradually applied widely in the recent years. Many FRP deck products by varied processes were created and manufactured. In the decks, local delamitation, debonding and buckling are usually the ultimate failure modes that cause the FRP strength not to be utilized fully and result in a sudden or brittle failure. In this paper, a concept of improving the mechanical performance of FRP decks by outside filament winding is presented. Two sets of experiments are conducted in order to compare the suggested filament wound FRP decks with the others without winding under static load. In the tests, the ultimate load of the pultruded shaped plank increased largely and the stiffness improved obviously by the filament winding. The ultimate deformation capacity of the combined deck was enhanced greatly. Pseudo ductility appeared in the filament wound combined deck. Based on the experimental results, the mechanism of the outside filament winding which provides not only the additional shear and torsion stiffness but also the confinement is analyzed. The finite element analysis also proves that the outside filament winding can effectively improve the performance of FRP bridge decks. 1