Mechanical performance of pultruded FRP plates in beam-to-beam connections

This paper focuses on multibolted pultruded fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) plates in all FRP beam-to-beam connections under both static and cyclic loads. Thanks to the experience accumulated from a previous study concerning the behavior of joints under monotonic loading, the goal of this work was to investigate the behavior of plates connected through bolts to a vertical and a horizontal beam. The experimental tests demonstrated that multibolted FRP pultruded plates have a dominant influence on the response of connections and, in particular, on their collapse. In detail, damage only affected the multibolted plate during the tests, especially near bolt holes, whereas structural profiles remained substantially intact. As a consequence, the nonlinear behavior of joints was affected strongly by progression of the damage in the multibolted plate. The innovative use of multibolted pultruded plates, instead of web and flange cleats, for the realization of bolted beam-to-beam connections is a challenge, and the aim of this work was to understand the real behavior and failure modes of these FRP plates in the ultimate limit state.