Behaviour of Membrane Construction Materials under Bi-Axial Tensile Loading

This paper focused on the tensile performance of PVC-coated membrane materials under multi-axial loads. Several groups of experiments were carried out to investigate the effect of the specimen configuration and the loading speed on the tensile properties. It could be concluded that the configuration of the specimen plays an important role on the tensile performance of the materials. The suitable configuration for multi-axial loading tests had been identified. It was also found out that the loading speed had certain effect on the tensile failure performance and the tensile response. A loading speed of lower than 20mm/min was suggested to achieve a reasonable result of the multi-axial tensile performance of PVC-coated membrane materials. Another group of tensile experiments with a crack in the center of the specimens under multi-axial loads were performed. It was noticed that the tensile properties in warp direction of the coated membrane materials play an important role in the tensile failure under multi-axial loads, no matter the initial crack length and the crack orientation are.