Determination of critical load for global flexural buckling in concentrically loaded pultruded FRP structural struts

•A comprehensive test database which is developed in this paper serves as a valuable reference document for future solution development and validation, assessment of existing solutions and future database establishment.•A new closed-form equation to determine the reduction factor for global buckling of PFRP members is developed in this paper, which makes the original solution recommended by Eurocode 3 easy to be used to predict the global buckling loads of PFRP elements.•A second new empirical closed-form equation is derived based upon the experimental database. And validation of the explicit expression is performed by comparison with validated numerical simulations.•Both new proposed equations which have higher accuracy compared with those of five existing solutions can be conveniently used by structural engineers at the preliminary engineering design stage for accurately assessing the reliability and safety of composite structures under concentric compressive loading. This paper presents a comprehensive test database of concentric compression experiments on pultruded fiber-reinforced polymer (PFRP) specimens that failed in a global flexural buckling mode published in literature between 1969 and 2016. A new closed-form equation to determine the reduction factor for global flexural buckling of PFRP structural struts under axial compression is developed on the basis of the Ayrton-Perry formula and observed initial out-of-straightness of PFRP members measured by other researchers. Recognizing that data on initial imperfections may be unavailable, a second new empirical closed-form equation is derived based upon the experimental database. Validation of the two explicit expressions is performed by both comparison to experimental data and comparison with validated numerical simulations. In addition, the accuracies of the two proposed equations are compared with those of five closed-form solutions available in the literature; both results in more accurate predictions than the extant equations. Both new proposed equations can be conveniently used by structural engineers at the preliminary engineering design stage for accurately assessing the reliability and safety of composite structures under concentric compressive loading.