Performance of adhesively-bonded joints of laminated composite materials under different loading modes

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate quasi-static performance of adhesively-bonded joints with adherends manufactured from a laminated composite material under tensile and bending loading modes. For this purpose, a film adhesive, AF163-2K, produced by 3M, and a glass fiber reinforced polymer matrix composite, Hexply 913/33%/UD280, produced by Hexcel were used. In the current work, numerical analysis of the joints was carried out using ABAQUS/Standard finite element program, and also a series of experimental studies were conducted. While the thickness of the adherends and the adhesive layer were kept constant, 2 mm and 0.200 mm, respectively, the composite adherends with 10 layers for different fiber orientations - 10°, 20°, 45° and 55° (symmetric and balanced) – and for different overlap lengths, 15 mm, 25 mm and 40 mm, were considered. Our results showed that failure mechanisms in the joints was different from each other for different loading modes. Numerically obtained stress distributions in the joints and composites give insight into the experimentally obtained results.