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Adhesive bonding is increasingly being considered by engineers for load-bearing joints to complement, or supplement, traditional mechanical fasteners for a large variety of structural materials, including fibre-reinforced polymers, timber, and steel. However, practitioners are still largely applying analysis and design methods, including codes and standards, that rely heavily on fudge factors. This is not due to the relative novelty of the joining technique, and the complexity of the associated mechanics. This paper guides the reader through some of the most important aspects of adhesively bonded joints, and the reasons why classical mechanics can only be applied in conjunction with fudge factors. Subsequently, the principles of fracture mechanics (FM) are presented; it is shown that, despite its conceptual strengths, FM is rather difficult to implement, as it introduces mechanical concepts practitioners are not familiar with. Then probabilistic methods (PM) are introduced; it is shown that PM can be considered as an extension of classical mechanics, as they can be easily implemented as a post-processing routine of the latter. Additionally, it is shown that PM, unlike FM, neither require specific test procedures for characterisation, nor complicated numerical analyses. Lastly, the paper offers a step-by-step guide for the implementation of PM for the dimensioning of adhesively bonded joints. The second part of this paper illustrates the latter analysis and design of adhesively bonded joints on a series of examples involving FRP, timber, and steel.

This last paper of a series of three concludes the analysis of a series of adhesively bonded tube-in-tube (TiT) joints composed of glass-fibre reinforced polymers (G-FRP) for which induction heating with Curie-particles (CP) was used to accelerate curing. It focuses on the prediction of their load capacity using a probabilistic method (PM). First, the G-FRP material was characterised with regard to transverse (tensile) and shear stresses, which allowed to determine a valid failure criterion, including the related statistical description subsequently required for the PM. Then, finite element analysis (FEA) was used to determine the stresses within the TiTs, for not only a perfect geometry, but also considering a series of possible geometrical imperfections (offset and misalignment of the centrelines, and ovalisation) with three degrees of severity. The influence of aforesaid imperfections on stresses was determined, and discussed. Based thereupon, load capacity was numerically determined, compared to the experimental values, and the influence of imperfections highlighted. Predicted joint capacities agreed well with the experimental ones. The influence of centreline offset and ovalisation was found to be of minor importance, if compared to that of the misalignment. By an extension of the procedure, scattering of the experimental data was also predicted in form of upper and lower quantiles, which also agreed well.