Effect of adhesive thickness, adhesive type and scarf angle on the mechanical properties of scarf adhesive joints

The effects of adhesive thickness, adhesive type and scarf angle, which are determined as the main control parameters by the dimensional analysis, on the mechanical properties of a scarf adhesive joint (SJ) subjected to uniaxial tensile loading are examined using a mixed-mode cohesive zone model (CZM) with a bilinear shape to govern the interface separation. Particularly, the adhesive-dependence of the vital cohesive parameters of CZM, which mainly include initial stiffness, total fracture energy and separation strength, is introduced emphatically. The numerical results demonstrate that the ultimate tensile loading increases as the adhesive thickness decreases. Cross the ultimate tension, the joint loses the load-bearing capacity when adopting the brittle adhesive but sustains partial load-bearing capacity while selecting the ductile adhesive. In addition, for the joint with the ductile adhesive, the maximum applied displacement until the complete failure of it is directly proportional to the adhesive thickness, which is different from the case using the brittle adhesive. Taking the combination of the ultimate loading and applied displacement into account, failure energy is employed to evaluate the joint performances. The results show that the failure energy of the joint with the brittle adhesive increases as the adhesive thickness decreases. Conversely, the situation of the joint using the ductile adhesive is vice versa. Moreover, the effect of the adhesive thickness becomes more noticeable with decreasing the scarf angle owing to the variation of the proportion of each component of the mixed-mode. Furthermore, all the characteristic parameters (the ultimate tensile loading, the maximum applied displacement and the failure energy) that adopted to describe the performances of SJ increase as the scarf angle decreases. Finally, the numerical method employed in this study is validated by comparing with existing experimental results.