EXPERIMENT STUDY OF COMPOSITE WALL BOARDS WITH GFRP FACE SHEETS AND A PAULOWNIA WOOD CORE

A simple and innovative composite panel with GFRP face sheets and a paulownia wood core，manufactured by vacuum assisted resin infusion process，was developed． These panels could be employed in the civil engineering due to their advantages of low cost，high strength to weight ratios and convenient usage． An experimental study was carried out to validate the effectiveness of this panel． Three full-scale specimens with different height /thickness ratio were tested under in-plane axial compression loading． Experiments show that the ultimate loading capacity is increased with the composite wall thickness ratio decreases and failure mode is instability failure．