Investigation of Bending/Buckling Characteristics for FRP Composite Poles

In recent years, the application of high-performance FRP composites in construction industry has grown tremendously in several different directions. The composite materials have been used extensively in manufacturing stand-alone structural members such as beams, columns, and wall panels in cooling tower system, in strengthening and retrofitting the existing but deteriorating structures to prevent the corrosion of steel members and the spalling of concrete surface. Other application area under consideration include infrastructure and facility members for transmission towers, closed circuit television poles, sign posts, guardrails, bridge railings, and light-gage structural system. The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate an application of FRP composites in product development for utility and/or lighting fixture poles, highway sign post, and medium size of transmission tower elements. This kind of infrastructural system can be designed, constructed, and operated in many challenging environments on planet earth, in-space, and on other planetary bodies such as the moon and mars. The objectives of this investigation are: (a) to determine the bending and buckling strengths of various FRP poles using eigenvalue solution, (b) to evaluate and compare the ultimate strength and stress of the facility poles using three dimensions finite element computational analysis, and (c) to perform the parametric structural efficiency analysis for determining an optimum rigidity length ratio, a/l, between the variable length from the fixed end to the overall length of the pole. The results indicate that the rigidity length ratio, a/l, as well as the moment of inertia ratio, I_T / I_B, have significant influence on the performance of facility poles, The study also proves that the step pole used in analytical model is light weight than the convention tapered pole for particular configurations.