Roham Rafiee

Abstract:

Glass-Fiber Reinforced-Polyester (GFRP) pipes are increasingly used in different water, wastewater, petrochemical, oil and gas industries due to their anti-corrosive and improved mechanical properties. The main objective of this study is to provide an overall picture on conducted modeling and simulation characterizing mechanical behavior of GFRP pipes in Composites Research Laboratory (COMRESLAB) during the past six years. The majority of conducted investigations are limited to experimental studies, while modeling and simulation can play a key role in understanding the behavior of these pipes at early stages of design process and prior to lunching a mass production. The certification procedure of GFRP products regulated by international standards necessitates performing a series of cumbersome long-term qualification tests on full-scale GFRP pipes up to 10,000 h estimating residual properties at the end of design lifetime (50 years). Moreover, the required short-term experimental programs for obtaining nominal design requirements are very costly due to the destructive nature of defined tests. In this talk, all performed computational simulation for evaluating the performance GFRP pipes in COMRESLAB are presented in an integrated framework. The conducted studies consist of estimating functional failure pressure, investigating the influence of production inconsistencies on the failure pressure and analyzing long-term behavior from both creep and fatigue viewpoints. The performed investigations have been also validated using experimental data obtained on industrial scale. Thus, the capability of developed modeling in providing an insight into the is elaborated which can pave the road toward the industrial applications of these pipes. Finally, a gap analysis is carried out and new perspectives which are still required to be developed more deeply for their industrial applications or have not been addressed in literature are also nominated.