Through thickness stress distributions in pultruded GRP materials

This paper describes an experimental methodology for determining the through thickness properties of pultruded GRP materials and their application in finite element analysis (FEA) of adhesively bonded joints. The finite element analysis is validated using an infra-red thermography based experimental mechanics technique known as thermoelastic stress analysis. The obtained results show that the measured through thickness values fall within the assumed bounds of previous work and have highlighted that interactions between the fibres and resin in the through thickness direction are present but not in a particularly intuitive manner. Moreover, the work presented herein highlights that the value of shear modulus used in the numerical model is an important consideration.