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Computers & S~rucrures Vol. 21, No. l/2, pp. 265-271, 1985
B 1985 Pergamon Press Ltd.
Printed in the U.S.A.

THE LARGE DEFORMATION ANALYSIS OF A GRAPHITE

FISHING ROD

H. OHNISHIand A. MATSUZAKI
Torayca Apphcation Research Laboratory, Toray Industries, Inc., Sonoyama, Otsu 520, Japan

Abstract-The purpose of this paper is to present the analysis and design considerations of a graphite
fishing rod. A large displacement and small strain analysis was performed and good agreement was
obtained with experimental data. In addition, the following was found: The bending strain distribution
of the fishing rod varies with the load level and the point which shows the maximum bending strain
travels from the tip to butt area with increasing load. The fracture of the fishing rod occurs at the load
when the bending strain reaches the smaller of the material failure strain and the critical buckling
strain. By the computer aided design method proposed here, analytical predictions of the fracture load
and the fracture location were calculated, and good correlation was obtained with experimental data.

1. INTRODUCTION 2.2 Experimental method

Static flexural testing was performed by hanging
The high specific strength and stiffness of graphite
weights, in increments of 0.1 kg (0.98 N) per load
composites have enabled the manufacturers to tai-
step, from the tip of the lishing rod, fixed with a
lor the weight and stiffness of fishing rods to fit the
butt angle of 75” from the horizontal. Load-deflec-
needs of lishers[ I]. The best actions for sensitivity
tion curves were measured by photograph, and the
and good casting are achieved by properly design-
actual butt angle was found to be 73”.
ing the tapers of each graphite thin walled tubular
A strain gage measurement was also performed
rod. However, the design of graphite fishing rods,
simultaneously. Standard resistance strain gages (5
which show highly nonlinear load-deflection re-
mm gage length) were bonded to the top and bottom
sponses, has been carried out using experimental
pipe surfaces and the strain was measured by a mul-
trial and error methods, because of the difficulties
tipoint digital strain meter.
in analysing the large deformation characteristics
of the rods.
2.3 Load-dejlection curve
In this paper, a nonlinear finite element analysis
Figure 3(a) shows the load-deflection curves of
and computer aided design technique of a graphite
the fishing rod and the results of the strain meas-
fishing rod are discussed. An experimental meas-
urement are given in Fig. 4. It is found from this
urement by strain gages confirmed the usefulness
figure that the bending strain distributions of the
of this technique. Graphite fishing rods are gener-
fishing rod vary with load level and the point which
ally stressed to be close to the ultimate strength of
shows the m~imum bending strain travels from the
the composite material and tend to show cata-
tip to butt area with increasing load. Fig. 4 also
strophic failure in the butt area due to bending
shows that the pure bending condition is achieved
buckling.
as the measured strain distributions are symmetri-
cal (considering the tension and compression
2. EXPERIMENTATION sides).
2.1 Properties of graphite fishing rod
The graphite fishing rod collapsed catastrophi-
Figure 1 illustrates the measured dimensions of cally at the load of 1.3 kg (12.74 N) in the No. 6
the graphite fishing rod. This rod is a seven piece piece, and the measured strain at that location was
construction. The extended length of the telescop- found to be 0.6%.
ing rod is 2.9 m with no guides and reel. This fishing
rod is used for still fishing in small streams, and it
3. ANALYSIS
is popular in Europe and Japan.
The No. I piece of the rod in Fig. 1 consists of 3.1 Finite element analysis
a graphite/glass/scrim hybrid tapered rod. The other To perform the large displacement nonlinear fi-
pieces are made of graphite/scrim thin walt tapered nite element analysis of the fishing rod, we need a
pipes. Unid~ectio~l ~aphit~e~xy prepreg tapes large number of load steps, and equilib~um itera-
(TORAYCA T3OO/No. 2501) were positioned lon- tions at each load step, with a fine finite element
gitudinally in the pipe. The glass scrim helps to give model. However, this may require much computer
hoop strength to the pipe. The measured elastic time. To reduce the computational cost, it is fre-
moduli of each piece are shown in Fig. 2. quently best to perform a nonlinear analysis without
265
 H. OHNISHI and A. MATSLIIAKI

PIECE No.
14 ' 6 5 4 3 2 1
I I I I I I 1
A 12-
izi
- lo-
zl
I- 8-
5 6-
;;
4-
2-
I
0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
LENGTH (ml
Fig. I. Dimensions of a graphite fishing rod.

PIECE No.
7 6

6
b ----
4t
2I------ Lr

1 I I I I I I
0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
LENGTH b)

Fig. 2. Finite element model of a graphite fishing rod (ET = 0.98 GPa, CL7 = 0.392 GPa. VU = 0.3).
 The large deformation analysis of a graphite fishing rod 267

2.5 2.5

2
N
2.0

1.5
2.0

1.5
r P = o.lkg

1.0 1.0

0.5 0.5

---- EX!'ERIME

0 C
7i5--3+, m

-0.5
(a) (b)

Fig. 3. Load-deflection curve: (a) butt angle Q = 73”; (b) a = 88”; (c) a = 0” (1 kg = 9.8 NJ.
 268 H. OHNISHI
PIECE
I 7 6 5
I I I I
-0.6 L
Fig. 4. Load-strain
equilibrium iterations, but using a sufficiently large
number of load stepsl2f. It was found that a dis-
placement solution. practically accurate enough
and cost effective, was obtained with a fairly coarse
f’inite element model using the above procedure.
3.1 Finite element modeling
The nonhnear FEM code used in this analysis
was ADINA[3J. A large displacement and small
strain analysis was performed using the total La-
grangian formulation, without equilibrium itera-
tions but reformation of stiffness in each load step.
The eight-node orthotropic plane stress element
was used to model the orthotropic tapered pipe.
The model of the fishing rod is shown in Fig. 2;
note that the circular pipe cross sections were mod-
eled by rectangular cross sections, with equivalent
bending rigidity. In this modeling, cross sectional
areas are not equal to those of pipe sections, but
this effect is negligible as the axial stresses are
small. The stiffened ends of the pipe joint sections
were not taken into account in this model, because
the lengths of the joint sections are small compared
to those of each piece. The height h, which is dis-
continuous at the joint sections, was made contin-
uous by taking mean values at each joint.
The elastic moduli of each piece, which were
and A. MATWLAKI
No.
4 3 2 1
I I
MEASURED P(kg)
--o-- 0.1
- 0.5
-Q-- 0.9
--c- 1.3
diagram (butt angle = 73”)
used in the numerical analysis, are shown in Fig,
2. The longitudinal modulus EL was determined by
the three point bending testing of each piece. The
initial deflection caused by the self weight of the
fishing rod and the lead lines for strain measurement
was not taken into account in the analysis as the
corresponding level of deflection was small.
The convergence behaviour of the deflection so-
lution was investigated with various numbers of
load steps, and it was found that a practically ac-
curate enough solution was obtained with 900 load
steps to the tip load of 1.5 kg (14.7 N). This required
200 set of CPU time on a IBM3083 computer.
Figure 3(a) shows the deflection curves of the
numerical and measured results of the fishing rod,
with butt angle LY= 73”. and shows good agreement
between the numerical calculations and the exper-
imental data.
3.4 Bending strain
Bending strains of the fishing rod were calcu-
lated from the bending moment which was obtained
from the deflection curve of the finite element anal-
ysis. According to curved beam theory, the bending
moment M and strain E are given by the following
 The large deformation analysis of a graphite fishing rod 269

PIECE No.
7 6 5 4 3 i 1

0.6- P (kg)
0.1
h
dP 0.5
V
0.9
2 0.4-
1.3
=;

0.2 -

0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0

(a) LENGTH (ml
PIECE No.
7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I I I I I I I I

0.6 -
h
dp
Y
5 0.4-
a
a
0.2 -

\
.J I
0.0 2.5 3.
(b) LENGTH (ml
PIECE No.
7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I I I I I I 1
I

I----
----

I I
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
(cl LENGTH (ml

Fig. 5. Load-strain diagram: (a) butt angle a = 73”; (b) Q = 88”; (c) (Y = 0”.
270 H. OHNISHI and A. MA~SUZAKI

3(c), and the results of the bending strains, which

.0 were calculated from the deflection curves, are
given in Figs. 5(b) and 5(c), respectively.
L Figure 7 shows envelopes of the maximum bend-
ing strain at the load I .3 kg (12.74 Nl in the cases
of 88”. 73”. and 0” butt angle. As shown in Fig. 7.
the maximum bending strain occurs at the No. 6
Fig. 6. buckling for a long orthotropic cylinder in pure
bending (flattening of the cylinder cross section). piece in the case of u = 73”. The strength design
of fishing rods involves determining the bending
strain levels of each piece from these strain envel-
equations: opes.

M = Py. (I) 4. BUCKLING STRENGTH

MD
“=ET* As for the bending buckling of long orthotropic
cylinders, the nonlinear prebuckling deformation
where y is the distance to the load vector P. El is occurs due to flattening of the cylinder cross section
the bending rigidity of the pipe, and D is its di- (see Fig. 6), and the bending buckling strain E,, is
ameter. given by the following equation[4]:
Figure S(a) shows the comparison between the
measured bending strains and the calculated re-
sults. A good correlation between the experimental
data and the numerical results confirms the validity
of this approach. where El_ is the axial stiffness. EH is the circumfer-
ential stiffness, t is the thickness of the cylinder.
3.5 Etwelopes of loud-betzdittg sttwin dirrgvtrttt and R is its radius. As the buckling strain E,,-is pro-
Numerical solutions were performed to inves- portional to t/R. it may occur that the buckling
tigate theoretically the effect of the butt angle for strains of pieces near the butt area are smaller than
the cases of c1 = 88” and 0”. The results of the nu- the material failure strains (because t/R is small).
merical calculations of the deflection curves in the Figure 7 also shows the calculated buckling
cases of a = 88” and 0” are given in Figs. 3(b) and strains of Nos. 5-7 pieces. (with E, = 0.784 GPa

PIECE No.
7 6 5 4 2 1
1.0' I I / 1 I I 1

MM-ERIAL FAILURE STRAIN

0.8 - BENDING BUCKLINGSTFUUN

/ M4XIMUl STRAIN ENVELOPES AT 1.3kgQ2.74N)
/
butt angle = 88O

I I I I I 1
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
LENGTH (m)
Fig. 7. Bending strains of a graphite fishing rod
 The large deformation analysis of a graphite fishing rod
and ltLe = 0.3), the material failure strains, and the
maximum strain envelopes at the load of 1.3 kg
(12.74 N). It can be seen from this figure that the
bending buckling strain curve is close to the max-
imum strain envelope of the 73” butt angle at the
No. 6 piece, and it coincides with the results of
actual collapse. That is, the strength of this fishing
rod is determined by the bending buckling strength,
because the bending buckling strains of Nos. 6 and
7 pieces are 0.6 - 0.7%, which is smaller than the
material failure strains of approximately 1%. This
shows the poor stability performance of this type
of laminate with low transverse stiffness. Placing
the 90” graphite layers at the top surface of the pipe
increases the transverse flexural rigidity, and hence
the critical bending strain is increased, but this at
the expense of the axial stiffness.
5. CONCLUSIONS
The major results and conclusions of this inves-
tigation are:
(1) A large displacement finite element analysis of
a graphite fishing rod was performed, and cal-
culated deflection curves showed good agree-
meet with experimental data.
(2) The bending strains of the fishing rod were cal-
culated from the deflection curves of the finite
element analysis and good correlation was ob-
tained with measured data.
(3) The bending strain distributions of the fishing
271
rod vary with load level and the point which
shows the maximum bending strain travels
from the tip to the butt area with increasing
load.
(4) The fracture of the fishing rod occurs at the
load when the bending strain reaches the
smaller of the material failure strain and the
critical buckling strain.
(5) By the computer aided design method pro-
posed here, analytical predictions of the frac-
ture load and the fracture location of the graph-
ite fishing rod were calculated, and good
correlation was obtained with experimental
data.
Acknowledgments-The authors are grateful to DAIWA
SEIKO INC. for supplying the graphite fishing rod and
information, and also to many individuals of the Torayca
Application Research Laboratory for their contribution to
this article.
REFERENCES
J. Fisher, The evolution of the manufacture of ad-
vanced composites for use in tubular recreational prod-
ucts. 29th SAMPE Symposium, 1984, p. 1296-10.
ADINA System theory and modeling guide. Sec. 4.3.
Nonlinear static analysis. ADINA Engineering, Inc.,
1983.
ADINA Users manual ADINA Engineering, Inc.,
1981.
K. T. Kedward, Nonlinear collapse of thin-walled com-
posite cylinders under flexural loading. ICCM/Z, 1978.
p. 353-13.