Experimental analysis of compressive behavior of E-Glass fiber reinforced IPN (vinyl ester/polyurethane) composite pipes

The manuscript discusses about the effect of compressive load on the E-Glass fiber reinforced interpenetrating polymer networks (IPNs). In this work, a series of combination of vinyl ester (VER) loaded polyurethane (PU) IPNs have been taken as the matrix material with the E-Glass reinforcement, with the loading of 0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% PU respectively. Besides hand-layup technique was used to fabricate the cylindrical shells in order to get the final shape of the IPN composite pipe. Simultaneously to validate the compressive strength behavior of the IPN composite pipe, experimental analysis was carried out as per the ASTM D695 standard at normal room temperature to extract compressive strength value of the PU loaded IPN composite pipes. During this test, it was observed that physical strength of the composite pipes reduces gradually as much as PU addition into the IPN composite pipe increases. Surprisingly, another important notification was that, the geometric structure of the composite pipes is not affected as like as the crushing observed on the pure VER pipe. As much as loading of the PU into the IPN, increases the structural integrity of the composite pipes in outstanding (retains structural ability) manner. Further the experimental analysis values are validated with numerical analysis software ANSYS, obtained values and numerical values are shown good agreement each other.