Experimental and numerical investigation of the strain energy release rate of composite adhesively bonded joints under mode II loading

In this paper, the strain energy release rate (SERR) and its critical value, i.e. the fracture energy, of theglass/epoxy composite adhesively bonded joints were determined using an end notch flexure (ENF) specimen. In order toobtain SERR, the corrected beam theory (CBT) and compliance based beam method (CBBM) were used and the resultswere compared. The advantage of CBBM over the CBT is that it is not necessary to measure the crack length duringpropagation that can be challenging and may introduce a non-negligible error on the fracture energy measurement.Moreover, the CBBM can account for the fracture process zone (FPZ) effects that can be considerable when a ductileadhesive is used. Also the experimental and numerical R-curves were compared.\

Keywords:

adhesively bonded joints , end notch flexure (ENF) , fracture toughness , strain energy release rate (SERR)