Abstract: The glass fiber reinforced plastic mortar sand pipe has high performance and is often used as the underground pipe. However, many countries do not adopt the glass fiber reinforced plastic sand pipe because of its higher cost compared to that of the traditional buried pipe. This paper takes the pipe ring stiffness as a reference index to optimize the design of the DN1500 glass fiber reinforced plastic sand pipe, aiming to reduce the piping cost. Firstly, this paper tests the ring stiffness of DN1500 pipe and then simulates the pipe ring stiffness of with ANSYS. The experimental data and simulation data are compared to verify the feasibility of ANSYS in analyzing the pipe ring stiffness. Secondly, ANSYS was used to analyze the relationship between the ring stiffness and the four variables, such as the pipe layer number, the fiber volume fraction, the intercross enwind layer volume fraction and the fiber winding angle, thus obtaining the relationship between the ring stiffness and the four variables. At last, this paper uses the MATLAB and ANSYS joint-analysis and combines with the PSO intelligence algorithm to optimize the pipe structure. The optimized pipe not only meets the requirement of ring stiffness, meanwhile, its volume is 12% less than that of the original pipe.

Key words: ring stiffness, particle swarm optimization, finite element analysis, MATLAB