Abstract
The current quest for low weight structures has led to a significant increase in the use of adhesive bonded joints more so for applications involving fibre reinforced composite materials. Adhesive bonded joints have major advantages over conventional joining methods such as riveting and bolting; and the nature of composite materials precludes use of other conventional methods such as welding, brazing and soldering. These advantages include lower structural weight due to lower density of the adhesive compared to traditional structural joining materials, lower fabrication costs, resistance to environmental degradation, better aesthetic appeal, lower stress concentrations, noise and vibration isolation capabilities and relative ease of use. Incorporating adhesive bonded joints into mechanical component design requires a higher level of understanding of adhesive joint behaviour. In particular it is important to understand the load transfer and joint failure mechanisms operative in the adhesive bonded joints. A lot of design information is available on conventional joining methods while information on design of bonded joints remains restricted to specialised applications such as automotive and aerospace . The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of bond thickness on the load transfer between a steel insert and tubular glass fibre reinforced composite component under axial loading. A finite element analysis model is developed to analyse the behaviour of the joint . The model is validated using experimentally measured tensile response data for a selected insert length and adhesive layer thickness . The obtained results show the close relationship between the load transfer distances with adhesive elastic modulus. Furthermore the stress distribution along the adhesive bond layer was found to be independent of adhesive layer thickness. Adhesive layer thickness also has insignificant contribution to stress levels and load transfer distance.