Experimental study on the carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer–steel interfaces based on carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer delamination failures and hybrid failures

Abstract

The failure mode is crucial to the interfacial bond performance between carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer plates and steel substrates. Existing studies mainly focused on the cohesive failures in the adhesive; however, research on other types of failure modes is still limited. In this article, a series of single-shear bonded joints are prepared to investigate the bond behaviors of the carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer–steel interfaces based on carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer delamination failures and hybrid failures. Three kinds of adhesives—which have different tensile strengths and elastic moduli—and two kinds of carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer plates—which have different interlaminar shear strengths—are used to evaluate the influencing factors of carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer–steel interfaces. The three-dimensional digital image correlation technique is applied to measure the strain and the displacement on the surface of each specimen. The obtained test results include the strain distribution, the ultimate load, the failure mode, the load–slip curves, and the bond–slip relationships. For the carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer delamination mode, the results show that the load at the debonding stage is closely related to the interlaminar shear strength of the carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer plate, and the higher the interlaminar shear strength is, the greater the load. However, for the hybrid mode, the load of the whole test process is independent of the interlaminar shear strength of the carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer plate.