Buckling of vertically loaded fiber-reinforced polymer piles

Fiber-Reinforced Polymer(FRP) composites are considered to be a potentially promising material for use as pile foundations in harsh environments such as industrial or marine conditions. As with piles made of other materials, FRP piles may buckle under extreme loading situations during their installa tion by driving or jacking into soils or when they are subjected to permane nt superstructure loads. Since FRP composites generally have anisotropic pr operties, relatively low moduli, and relatively high elastic to shear modul us ratios compared to steel, for example, the shear deformation effect play s a more important role in dictating the buckling loads of FRP piles. In th is paper, the Timoshenko beam theory is adopted to derive solutions which i nclude the shear deformation effect for buckling loads of vertically loaded transversely isotropic FRP piles with five different boundary conditions. Parametric studies show that the buckling toads far the cases where the she ar deformation effect is considered are always lower than when the shear de formation effect is ignored.