Flexural behaviour of pultruded glass fibre reinforced polymer composite beams with bolted splice joints

Pultruded glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) composite wide flange (WF) beams were fabricated with mid-span splice joints. The joints comprised: two or six GFRP plates bolted to the flanges. The bolts were torqued to 3, 20 and 30 Nm. The 2.9 m span simply supported spliced beams were tested in symmetric three-point flexure. Each beam was subjected to three load – unload cycles and loads, mid-span deflections, support rotations and splice plate surface strains were shown to be linear and repeatable. Spliced beam transverse stiffnesses were quantified as functions of bolt torque for both splice plate configurations and were shown to increase linearly as the bolt torque increased. Transverse stiffnesses of unspliced and six-plate bolted/bonded splice jointed beams were compared and the stiffness of the splice bonded beam was shown to be about 47% stiffer than the splice bolted beam with a bolt torque of 3 Nm.