Measurement of the Distribution of Residual Stresses in Layered Thick-Walled GFRP Pipes

The objective of this study is to measure the axial, circumferential, shear and radial residual stress distributions in three thick-walled glass fibre reinforced plastic (GFRP) filament-wound pipes, two of which are layered. The measurement of residual stresses was carried out using a recently published layer removal method which overcomes the limitations of previous techniques and can be applied to layered anisotropic pipes of any wall thickness. Layers of approximately 0.3 mm thickness were incrementally ground from the outer surface of the pipes. The resulting strains were measured on the inner surfaces. A least-squares polynomial was fitted to each measured data set, and used to calculate the corresponding stress distributions. All of the resulting axial, hoop and shear stress distributions adhere to the requirement of self-equilibrium and the radial stress distributions all vanish to zero at the inner and outer surfaces. The radial stresses of the layered pipes showed a tendency to have two peaks, one for each layer, a consequence of the two-stage manufacturing process of these pipes. The measured axial and hoop stresses of all three pipes were similar at the inner surfaces despite significant differences in the stiffnesses in the principal directions arising from different wind angles.