Abstract
Natural fibre-reinforced composites have attracted a great deal of attention by the automotive industry mainly due to their sustainable characteristics and low cost. The use of sustainable composites is expected to continuously increase in this area as the cost and weight of vehicles could be partially reduced by replacing glass fibre composites and aluminium with natural fibre composites. Adhesive bonding is the preferred joining method for composites and is increasingly used in the automotive industry. However, the literature on natural fibre reinforced polymer composite adhesive joints is scarce and needs further investigation. The main objective of this study was to investigate experimentally adhesively bonded joints made of natural, synthetic and interlaminar hybrid fibre-reinforced polymer composites. The effect of the number of the interlaminar synthetic layers required in order to match the bonded joint efficiency of a fully synthetic GFRP bonded joint was studied. It was found that the failure load of the hybrid jute/glass adherend joints increased by increasing the number of external synthetic layers (i.e. the failure load of hybrid 3-layer joint increased by 28.6% compared to hybrid 2-layer joint) and reached the pure synthetic adherends joints efficiency due to the optimum compromise between the adherend material property (i.e. stiffness and strength) and a diminished bondline peel stress state.
Highlights
Bonded joints have shown to be viable substitutes to classical mechanical joints in various industries [1,2,3,4]
Light fibre tear (LFT) is defined as the presence of a thick adhesive layer on one side and no adhesive on the other with some surface resin and few fibres removed from the interface
A significant variation of joint behaviour was observed as a function of adherend material
Summary
Bonded joints have shown to be viable substitutes to classical mechanical joints in various industries (i.e. automotive, aeronautical, marine, sports, among others) [1,2,3,4]. NFRCs are nowadays used in non-structural car body parts, such as: door panels, package trays, hat racks, instrument panels, internal engine covers, sun visors, boot liners, oil air filters and even progressing to more structurally demanding parts such as seat backs and exterior underfloor panelling [7]. They present some disadvantages (i.e. variable fibre quality and humidity absorption due to a more hydrophilic fibre nature, leading to low fibre/ matrix interfacial strength) [8,9,10]. Several studies for the mechanical, thermal and impact characterization of jute fibres and their composites are available in the literature [11,12,13, 18]
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