Reinforced plastics implementations

The susceptibihty of resins, reinforcing fibres and composites to aqueous and non-aqueous environments has been reviewed. It is clear that with careful material selection and composite construction, reinforced plastics are very durable in aggressive conditions. One of the most severe environments, aqueous acids, can be designed to use the ideas presented here. This practice is implemented in industry, as demonstrated by the durability of GRP in environments encountered in chemical plant and conduit for corrosive effluents. 

Fiber-reinforced composite materials such as boron-epoxy and graphite-epoxy are usually treated as linear elastic materials because the essentially linear elastic fibers provide the majority of the strength and stiffness. Refinement of that approximation requires consideration of some form of plasticity, viscoelasticity, or both (viscoplasticity). Very little work has been done to implement those models or idealizations of composite material behavior in structural applications. 

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