Nowadays, the use of pipes manufactured
with composite materials is preferred for transferring
fluid by the oil and gas industries. For the correct
design of such infrastructures, determining their
material parameters makes recourse to specifically
regulated experimental tests. The tensile properties
of glass resin epoxy (GRE) pipes can be determined
using conventional direct tensile and internal hydrostatic
pressure tests. However, the conventional shear
and compressive test methods for determining the
compressive and shearing properties of a single GRE
layer cannot be followed reliably due to uncertainties
relevant to buckling, stress concentrations and
material locality. In addition, the filament winding’s
direction, characterizing the orthotropic behaviour
of such (GRE) composite material, can be chosen in
order to optimize the mechanical behaviour of the
pipe. Herein, an inverse analysis approach, previously
applied successfully by authors to different mechanical
contexts, is proposed to overcome the possible
above-mentioned uncertainties relevant to the compressive
and shearing properties of GRE material and to optimize the filament winding’s direction. The
load–displacement response of the flexural modulus
test ASTM D 2412 is considered as a measurable
quantity to be used in the inverse procedure. The
efficiency of the proposed method, in the sense of
accuracy and stability, is verified after creating some
pseudo-experimental tests, whose numerical results
have been statistically perturbed in order to simulate
experimental data’s noise. The proposed identification
procedure would require a relatively high computing
time, an uncommon knowledge in computational
mechanics, and a sophisticated computing
system. Therefore, in order to speed up the characterization
procedure and remove any need of deep
computational mechanics knowledge and advanced
computing devices, an “Offline” analysis tool, based
on proper orthogonal decomposition and radial basis
functions whi