Tensile properties of FRP ply splice structures

When the FRP structure becomes large, it is required to splice two or more plies to meet the size requirement. In order to understand the mechanical property of the FRP ply splice structure and get strong ply splice structures, the tensile properties of three kinds of unidirectional CFRP ply splice structures have been tested in the previous work in [1]. In this paper, another two structures were designed based on the S1 structure in [1], in order to improve the strength of this type of the ply splice structure. Compared with the S1 structure, the difference of the S1-1 structure was that the spliced point of each ply was optimized to extend the distance between the nearest spliced points. In the S1-2 structure, additional two carbon fiber fabrics were attached on each side of the S1-1 structure to restrain the bending of the specimen under a tensile load to improve the tensile strength. The results show that there is no big difference of the tensile strength between S1 and S1-1 structures, however, S1-2 really performs much higher tensile strength.