2015 Volume 64 Issue 10 Pages 775-782
In a gas circuit breaker of an electric power substation, a long operating rod made of an insulating material such as grass fiber reinforced plastics is employed, and when the breaker is operated, the rod was subjected to a strong impulsive compression load. In designing of the operating rods, therefore, the precise knowledge of their dynamic buckling loads is required. In this study, the dynamic elastic buckling behavior of GFRP rods the ends of which were tightly clamped was experimentally investigated. In the experiments, elastic buckling loads of slender GFRP rods in a wide range of loading velocities were measured by using the three different type testing machines: universal testing machine, hydraulic servo system and drop weight type impact loading machine. From the obtained experimental results, an empirical criterion for the dynamic buckling load of the GFRP rod was proposed in terms of the impact velocity and the slenderness ratio. Furthermore, we may show possibility that the proposed criterion can successfully describe buckling behaviors of long rods of many sorts of engineering materials with the same material parameters.
