Fatigue Behaviour of Adhesive Joints

This paper deals with the complexity of mechanical characterization of adhesives and modelling its behaviour in an assembly. Different testing systems have been studied such as tensile tests on bulk specimens, Arcan-Mines tests in different loading conditions, to characterize the mechanical behaviour and failure criteria of an epoxy base adhesive, under static and fatigue loading by taking into account viscoplastic behaviour of the adhesive.A static failure criterion has been proposed and extended for fatigue loading.Thick Adherent Shear Tests and single lap shear tests have been performed and compared with previous ones. A Finite Element (FE) simulation has been made in order to validate the proposed models.