Experimental and numerical investigation of adhesively bonded additive manufactured sandwich structures with a pyramidal lattice core

Abstract

ASBTRACT The application of adhesively bonded joints has increased in a large variety of different industrial sectors over the last decades. In comparison to other joining techniques, adhesively bonded joints can offer easier assembly, weight reduction, lower stress concentration, etc. Additive Manufacturing (AM) as a transformational approach in Industry 4.0 can even improve the structural performance of such joints in terms of more weight reduction, making more homogenous stresses in the adhesive layer of the bonded area. In this work, an adhesively bonded single lap joint (SLJ) with metallic sandwich structures and a pyramidal lattice core as adherend by using AM was designed, produced and tensile tested. The result of this study showed that in addition to the significant savings in the weight of the adhesively bonded joint, the additive manufactured sandwich adherend produces a more homogenous stress distribution compared to conventional adherends with the same material. Furthermore, two different finite element (FE) approaches were used for modelling the fracture behaviour of the additive manufactured joint, namely a solid element formulation and a simplified model using shell-beam formulation. The simplified shell-beam formulation reduces the modelling and calculation efforts massively and shows a good agreement with experimental results.