The Experimental Investigation of the Compressive Performance of Pultruded Rod Composite Struts

Pultruded carbon fibre/epoxy composites possess high fibre alignment. However, the characterisation of the compression performance of these materials in axial compression loading is sensitive to the factors such as specimen end preparation, loading misalignment and localised non-uniform loading. End fittings have been used to prevent the premature failure of these materials in axial compression test but this induced high complexity of the preparation process. In this study, we developed aneccentric buckling test methodology to investigate the compressive performance of pultruded carbon fibre/epoxy composites. The test results showed that the elastic modulus (85.5 ± 1.3 GPa) and flexural modulus (87.3 ± 3.0 GPa) were consistent with the value measured from tensile test at 88 GPa. A compressive failure strain at failure at -0.0134 ± 0.0007 was measured, which is higher compared with the reported values in literature for carbon fibre/epoxy pultruded rods. This shows that the eccentric buckling test is suitable for measuring the compressive failure strain of carbon fibre/epoxy pultruded rods.