Adhesively-bonded joints in hybrid structures

In many high performance structures, unions between composite materials with other light metals such as aluminium are required, for purposes of structural optimization. This book deals with the experimental and numerical study of single lap joints, bonded with a brittle and a ductile adhesive. These are applied to hybrid joints, between a high strength aluminium alloy and carbon fibre reinforced plastic adherends, with different overlap lengths. The Finite Element Method is used to perform detailed stress and damage analyses allowing to explain the joints' behaviour and the use of cohesive zone models enables predicting the joint strength and creating a simple and rapid design methodology. The joints' strength and failure modes were highly dependent on the adhesive, and this behaviour was successfully modelled numerically. Using a brittle adhesive resulted in a negligible maximum load improvement with the overlap length. The joints bonded with the ductile adhesive showed a nearly linear improvement of the maximum load with the overlap length. This book is especially useful for mechanical designers dealing with bonded joints, with emphasis to multi-material structures.