Degradation of the in-plane shear modulus of structural BFRP laminates due to high temperature

The behavior of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites at high temperature is a critical issue that needs to be clearly understood for their structural uses in civil engineering. However, due to technical difficulties during testing at high temperature, limited experimental investigations have been conducted regarding the thermal behavior of basalt fiber reinforced polymer (BFRP) composites, especially for the in-plane shear modulus of BFRP laminates. To this end, both an analytical derivation and an experimental program were carried out in this work to study the in-plane shear modulus of BFRP laminates. After the analytical derivation, the in-plane shear modulus was investigated as a function of the elastic modulus in different directions (0◦ , 45◦ and 90◦ of the load-to-fiber angle) and Poisson’s ratio in the fiber direction. To obtain the in-plane shear modulus, the four parameters were tested at different temperatures from 20 to 250 ◦C. A novel non-contacting digital image correlation (DIC) sensing system was adopted in the high-temperature tests to measure the local strain field on the FRP samples. Based on the test results, it was found that the elastic moduli in different directions were reduced to a very low level (less than 20%) from 20 to 250 ◦C. Furthermore, the in-plane shear modulus of BFRP at 250 ◦C was only 3% of that at 20 ◦C.