Pipe Stiffness of Buried GFRP and Polymer Mortar Pipe with Symmetrical Cross-Section

Abstract

Recently, glass fiber reinforced polymer plastic (GFRP) pipes are increasing trend in using in the water-supply system because of their advantages such as light-weight, corrosion resistance, etc. GFRP pipes discussed in this paper have polymer mortar layer for core sandwiched between two tape-winding glass fiber reinforced polymer plastic layers. So, GFRP pipe properties for the design such as pipe stiffness (PS) and equivalent modulus of elasticity ( ) is complicated to predict or to measure. In this study, we proposed the equation that can predict the equivalent pipe stiffness factor (EI) in relation to PS and using thickness of each material layer. The predicted result obtained by the equation proposed in this paper is compared with experimental result ASTM D 2412(2010). As a result, it was in the range of -3% to +7%. So, this proposed obtained according to equation can be used to design GFRP pipe used in practice.