Analysis of adhesive bonded joints: a unified approach

This paper presents a newly developed unified approach for the analysis and design of adhesive bonded joints. The adherends are modelled as beams or wide plates in cylindrical bending, and are considered as generally orthotropic laminates using classical laminate theory. Consequently, adherends made as asymmetric and unbalanced composite laminates can be included in the analysis. The adhesive layer is modelled in two ways. The first approach assumes the adhesive layer to be a linear elastic material and the second approach takes into account the inelastic behaviour of many adhesives. The governing equations are formulated in terms of sets of first order ordinary differential equations. The multiple-point boundary value problem constituted by the differential equations together with the imposed boundary conditions is solved numerically by direct integration using the ‘multi-segment method’ of integration. The approach is validated by comparison with finite element models and a high-order theory approach.