Adhesive joining is recognized as a potential enabling technology for a variety of material systems being considered in automotive structures where traditional fastening methods would be inappropriate. Well known examples include fiber reinforced composites and polymers. Additionally in certain circumstances, adhesive bonding of steel structures can provide benefits such as improved stiffness a...

The failure in structural adhesively bonded lap joints can be analyzed following different approaches: using a nominal stress state typically given by Strength of Material models, a local singular stress state induced at the mutimaterial corners of the joint, or using cohesive constitutive laws for the adhesive layer or other damage progression models. The aim of this paper is to analyze the su...

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are generally considered as a promising particle reinforcement of incorporating advanced properties and characteristics into epoxy nanocomposites. This paper investigated the bonding performances CNT-reinforced adhesively bonded joints on steel substrates using single lap shear (SLS) tests. The (including strength, fracture strain, toughness, failure mode) were studied w...

An experimental evaluation of mixed mode fracture tests conducted on adhesively bonded wood specimens using a dual actuator load frame is presented. This unit allows the fracture mode mixity to be easily varied during testing of a given specimen, providing improved consistency, accuracy, and ease of testing over a range of loading modes. Double cantilever beam (DCB) type specimens made of south...

Abstract The classical method of optimising structures for strength is computationally expensive due to the requirement performing complex non-linear finite element analysis (FEA). This study aims optimise an artificial neural network (ANN) architecture perform task predicting adhesively bonded joints in place FEA. A manual multi-objective optimisation was performed find a suitable ANN design s...