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Abstract

In this paper, a comprehensive investigation on the bending mechanical behavior of glass-fiber reinforced thermoplastic pipe (RTP) is implemented by using a three-dimensional (3D) solid finite-element (FE) model. A major contribution of this paper is to present a UMAT based equivalence procedure for solid elements, which is capable of considering the material anisotropic nonlinearity of thermoplastic composite pipe (TCP) laminate. First, the linearity and nonlinearity of RTP’s material are incorporated into the numerical analysis and their effects on the bending performance are compared. Then, based on the material nonlinearities, the influences of initial ovality, volume ratio of glass fiber, diameter-to-thickness (D/t) ratio and ply angle of filament winding on the bending performance of RTP are further investigated. Analytical results indicate that the material nonlinearity has a significant effect on the bending performance of RTPs. In addition, suitable geometrical parameters can improve the bending performance of RTPs and reduce the economic costs due to the smaller minimum allowable bending radius (MABR).

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