Development of a full elasto-plastic adhesive joint design analysis

Abstract

A previous adhesive joint analysis that accommodated non-linear adhesive behaviour is extended to model the elasto-plastic response of the adherends. The resulting analysis models the joint as an adherend-adhesive sandwich capable of sustaining any combination of end load conditions, thus enabling a wide variety of adhesive joints to be modelled. The adhesive is assumed to behave as a coupled set of non-linear shear and tension springs, and the adherends as cylindrically bent plates which yield under the action of combined tension and bending. The complete problem is reduced to a set of six non-linear first-order ordinary differential equations which are solved numerically using a finite-difference method. In this way a reasonable assessment of adhesive stresses and strains can be obtained easily, without resorting to the complexity of a two-dimensional finite element solution. A comparison between the results from these two methods has been made and is presented in this paper after the outline of the analysis derivations.