The Strength in the Weakness

Abstract

In this paper, a very ductile adhesive and a structural epoxy have been presented It has been shown that when designed correctly the ductile adhesive could take advantage of the epoxy, and that an adhesive which is relatively stronger in one mode, e.g. tension, is not necessarily so for the other mode, e.g. bending. Four Point Bending Test was carried out using a single lap joint configuration in which high strain concentrations were encountered at the ends of the overlap. It was found that in this mode the ductile adhesive having very low maximum tensile stress could break the hard steel having very high maximum tensile stress. Finite Element Analysis was also undertaken to investigate the stress distribution in the configuration.