Fatigue experiments on circular hollow sections with CFRP reinforced cutouts

• CFRP reinforcement significantly enhanced the fatigue life.
• For the specimens with smaller holes the fatigue life was far greater.
• Reinforced tubes outperformed the tubes with neither cutout nor reinforcement.
• CFRP reinforcement significantly decreased the strain values.

CHS members appear in a great many structural applications. These elements are in some cases exposed to cyclic loading. In a previous study (Ghanbari Ghazijahani et al., 2014) the authors conducted a series of fatigue experiments on perforated CHS members and found that large cutouts resulted in a significant reduction in fatigue life, while small cutouts provided stress relief to the base plate connection and increased life. This study focuses on recovering the fatigue life for larger cutouts by reinforcement with CFRP. Fatigue life was not only fully recovered with the CFRP reinforcement but dramatically increased relative to the unreinforced intact specimen.