Tensile behavior of glass fiber reinforced composite at different strain rates and temperatures

• Tensile strength and toughness of GFRP increase with increasing strain rate.
• Young’s modulus and tensile strength of GFRP decrease with increasing temperature.
• Maximum strain of GFRP is almost constant over the temperature range of −25–50 °C.
• The failure patterns of GFRP are related to the testing conditions.
• The shape parameter (m) values are only dependent on strain rate, but not temperature.

Glass fiber reinforced composite (GFRP) samples were tested at different strain rates from quasi-static up to 160 s−1 and temperatures from −25 to 100 °C to investigate any possible effects on their mechanical properties and failure patterns. The experimental results show that the tensile strength, maximum strain and toughness increase with increasing strain rates at room temperature, and the Young’s modulus, tensile strength and toughness decrease with increasing temperatures at the strain rate of 40 s−1. Weibull statistics were used to quantify the degree of variability in the tensile strength and obtain Weibull parameters for numerical simulations and engineering applications.