Analytical and experimental research on strength properties of adhesive bonded joints in aluminium structures

The structural use of adhesives in the building industry is growing in interest, due to successful applications in automotive and aerospace industry. However, the potential of adhesive joints is not yet fully utilized in building structures due to a lack of design rules c.q. building regulations. In particular the limited knowledge on the joint strength characteristics as well as the durability of the joint is a restriction for the use in practice. For these reasons analytical and experimental research projects have been carried out at Eindhoven University of Technology (see [1] to [3]). In the present paper only the static strength prediction is worked out in further detail. The project focused on the static failure load prediction of single lap joints using the singularity approach [1]. The lap joint is worked out analytically and numerically. Several elastic models for stress analysis were examined. The Allman-method [4] was worked out further into a singular stress failure criterion. The failure load prediction was verified by experiments on single lap joints with varying overlap length and width.