Cohesive zone model for high-cycle fatigue of adhesively bonded joints under mode I loading

A cohesive zone model adequate for simulating the behaviour of adhesively bonded joints subjected to high-cycle fatigue and pure mode I loading is presented. The bilinear cohesive zone law with linear softening relationship was considered. The main advantage of the proposed formulation is the use of a unique damage parameter accounting for cumulative damage resulting from static and fatigue loading. The method was implemented in a user subroutine of the commercial finite element software Abaqus®. Two-dimensional numerical simulations of the double cantilever beam test using different representative combinations of the modified Paris law coefficients were performed. It was verified that the results of the model simulate with excellent agreement the several Paris laws used as input, thus demonstrating the good performance of the method as a predictive tool.