An analytical closed-form model to evaluate the peel and shear stresses in middle plane for adhesively bonded composite single-lap joints

This article deals with the peel and shear stress distributions in a composite adhesively bonded single-lap joint. The proposed analytical model was obtained by extending a known model, for isotropic materials, to composite adherents using the laminated anisotropic plate theory. A pre-existent analytical model for orthotropic materials, for which some terms have been rewritten here in their correct form, is described below. The main difference between the proposed model and the pre-existent one is that the first allows us to consider the effect of varying the length of the outer adherents on the stress distributions. Numerical models were considered simply to make a comparison with the stress results of the proposed analytical model in several cases. The numerical model developed is a two-dimensional space model solved using FEM methodology. Finally, in order to evaluate the stress distribution, both models, analytical and numerical, were applied to single-lap joint with various overlapping and outer adherent lengths and different materials for the adherents.