Use of thin adherends in adhesively bonded joints under different loading modes

Abstract

The adhesive bonding technique is especially suited to the joining of thin materials. An adhesive joint consists of a structural adhesive and an adherend. When designing the joint, focusing on the behaviour of the adhesive is important. However, if the material to be joined is thin, then it becomes much more important to concentrate on the material properties. In the present work, two adhesives with different mechanical behaviour and two thin adherend materials, steel and aluminium, were selected for the production of adhesive joints. The single lap joint configuration was subjected to tests under bending load and also under tensile load. The results show that adherend plasticity plays an important part in the joint failure; specimens under bending load experienced high plastic deformation of adherends, depending on the strength of the adherend material. Overlap increase did not seem to affect the joint strength. When the joints were tested under tensile loading, it was observed that the load bearing capacity of adhesives was an important parameter influencing the joint strength, and that an increase in overlap seemed to contribute to the joint performance. In general, the results obtained imply that it is vital that the adherends used remain in their elastic deformation region to obtain a joint strength that reflects the mechanical behaviour of the adhesive used.