New designs of adhesive joints for thick composite laminates

Abstract

New joint designs are proposed for adhesive bonding of thick multilayered composite adherends. The objective is to reduce or eliminate the failure modes associated with delamination and tensile and/or shear failure of the surface plies that are often observed in lap joints, and provide for a better stress distribution in the adhesive. In contrast to lap-joint designs, which transfer in-plane tensile stresses and other loads from the adherends to doubler plates by out-of-plane shearing of the surface plies, the new joint configurations transfer most of the load by in-plane shear and normal stresses, through bonded inserts or interlocking interfaces which have the same thickness as the laminate adherends. Doublers will transfer a calculated percentage of the load. Finite-element evaluations of the internal stresses in laminates, joined in both the conventional lap method and the new manner, suggest that the proposed load-transfer mechanism may improve joint efficiency by substantially increasing the size of adhesively bonded areas, and by making the stresses in the adherends nearly uniform through the thickness of the laminate. Some of the designs allow for selected ratios of shear to normal stresses in the adhesive layers. The stress concentrations often found in conventional designs, in the adherend surface plies and the adhesive layer at the leading edges of the doublers, are substantially reduced.