Experimental and 3D non-linear stress analysis of adhesively bonded curved and scarf lap joints

Adhesive bonding is an excellent alternative to traditional joining techniques such as welding, riveting, and is commonly used in almost every sector of the industry. However, there are many factors that have to be accounted for during joint design to accurately predict strength of the joint. One of these is the design of adhesively bonded joints. The objective of this work is to study the influence of curvature on strength of adhesively bonded curved-lap joints. For that, different radii of curvature were introduced to the end zones of an aluminium sheet to which the adhesive is applied. Then, a scarf lap joint was obtained by increasing the radius of curvature for the same overlap length, and mechanical behaviour of curved and scarf lap joints was studied experimentally. Additionally, in the analyses, the Extended Drucker-Prager material model was used and to verify the finite element model, experiments were carried out. The results show that thickness, overlap length and curvature radius of the adherends have considerable influence on failure loads.