Mechanical behavior of connection of pultruded glass fiber reinforced polymer plates using FRP bolts and adhesive

Pultruded Fiber Reinforced Polymers (FRPs) have been increasingly used in civil infrastructure applications due to advanced properties such as high specific strength, lightweight and especially high corrosion resistance. In highly corrosive environment such as chemical and acid environment where metallic by-products are prone to corrosion, the use of adhesive bonding in addition to FRP bolts not only decreases the structure’s weight, limits the impacts of aggressive environment but also increases the ultimate strength of the connection and improves the connection stiffness. In this paper, mechanical behavior of pultruded FRP double-lap specimens combined by only FRP bolt as well as both FRP bolt and adhesive under tension tests was investigated by finite element method and experimental data. Two kinds of used adhesive were high strength adhesive and low elastic one. Results show that comparing with bolt-only specimens, connections with both FRP bolt and adhesive had the higher joint strength. Specimens with high strength adhesive had the highest joint strength but the shear out failure and delamination at FRP plates happened suddenly while the low elastic adhesive specimens witnessed the debonding failure and shear out failure alternately in the both sides of connections. Moreover, the stress distributions in the GFRP plates were also investigated and there were good agreements between finite element analysis (FEA) and experimental data achieved in this paper.