| Summary: | Fiber reinforced composites with high specific strength and stiffness are widely used in many engineering industries such as aerospace, wind turbine, automobile and defense science. In order to expand the usage of composites further, the manufacturability of composite into complex structure is essential but this requires additional secondary process such as adhesive bonding. Adhesive bonding is one of the methods used to combine pieces of materials or connect all the joints in the structure together. This method has been widely used in engineering applications as it bring enormous potential benefits from reduction of fasteners and the part count, which lead to the dramatic decrease of assemble cost and primary structural weight [1]. However, the connection of such joint represents a zone of potential weakness when the joint transmit tensile, bending and shear stresses between the different parts of the airplane and should be investigated deeply [2].
Single lap joint is one of the dominant joint configurations widely employed with composite adherends. In this project, initially, the failure response of thick composite joints with thick adhesive under three-point bending is investigated. Then, the failure behavior is simulated with ABAQUS® finite element package. Secondly, strain energy release at the stress concentration point was calculated using virtual crack closure technique. Finally, an experimental set-up was designed and fabricated to carry-out low-velocity impact tests on single-lap adhesive joints. Due to Instron DYNATUP equipment break-down, the impact tests couldn’t be completed.
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