Fabrication and Testing of a Wood-Framed FRP Structural Panel

: This paper presents an experimental program performed on a structural panel fabricated from glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) and a wooden frame. The tested panel consists of a timber frame with the dimensions of 1200 x 600 x 25 mm covered by GFRP layers which were manufactured by a hand-layup process. Tensile and flexure tests were conducted for the GFRP specimens and for GFRP-covered wood sections to evaluate the material properties. The results showed brittle failure under average maximum load of 9.28 kN, average maximum elongation of 7.7 mm and the modulus of elasticity for the GFRP was about 2400 MPa. The obtained bending stress for GFRP-covered wood sections ranged between 90-115 MPa. Additionally, full-scale panels were tested under distributed loads until failure to study their flexural behavior. The experimental results demonstrated good mechanical and physical properties for the presented GFRP-wood panels, which renders the use of such composite GFRP-wood panel promising in prefabricated structures.