Flexural behavior of glued GFRP tubes filled with concrete

The corrosion of steel reinforcement is considered the greatest factor limiting the service life of reinforced concrete structures. Glass fiber reinforced polymers (GFRPs) are known as cost-effective materials offering long-term durability and less maintenance. As a result, these materials show great potential for use in the civil engineering applications. Due to the high cost of the manufacturing die, pultruded GFRP tubes are produced in specific cross-section dimensions only. For high load applications and to comply with the serviceability requirements, a number of these pultruded sections can be assembled together by gluing them appropriately. This study presents an experimental investigation onto the flexural behavior of glued GFRP tube beams with 1, 2, 3 and 4 - cells filled with concrete under four-point loading. The results show that the strength of the 4 cells glued beams increased by 150 % and 88% for hollow and filled beams, respectively, compared with its counterpart single cell beam. The filled beams failed at 42 – 88 % higher load and showed 10 – 22 % higher stiffness compared with their hollow counterparts. The results also show that gluing small section tubes to produce large section beam is a practical solution to enhance the flexural performance of the composite tubes