Abstract

In recent years, wooden and concrete poles are replacing by others made of fiberglass-reinforced polyester. The advantages of this material compared to traditional ones are its low weight, ease of transport and resistance to corrosion, fire and weather.

Due to the great variability in the mechanical properties provided by manufacturers, it may be useful to define a bending test procedure to characterize the material using specimens obtained from poles. Since these specimens have a curved section, it is necessary to analyze the influence of shear when the width and length of the specimen vary.

In this study, the effect of shear is analyzed to obtain the flexural and shear moduli by means of bending tests with different lengths of the specimen.