Meshless and hyper-elastic implementation to analyse flexible adhesives

Abstract

Structural adhesives and the joints involving them are often analysed using elastic and elastic-plastic material models. Nowadays, flexible adhesives are being used for structural applications. The material models used for structural adhesives are not always suitable for flexible adhesives. Hyper-elastic material models had been proven more suitable to model flexible adhesives. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a well-accepted technique to model and analyse adhesive joints. Commercial FEM packages already have hyper-elastic capabilities, but not many applications to adhesive joints had been studied. Recently, Meshless Methods (MM) have also been brought into this field. Although the nature of MM made them attractive for the analysis of flexible adhesives and the joints bonded with them, no previous analyses had been reported. Several hyper-elastic models are available. One of them, the Ogden model, can represent several models through converting their parameters. Therefore, the Ogden model implementation is more versatile.In this work, the Ogden hyper-elastic model was implemented into a MM, the Natural Neighbour Radial Point Interpolation Method (NNRPIM). The implementation was validated using literature data. The proposed methodology could be the basis for further application to adhesive joints bonded with flexible adhesives.