Search

International audience; The use of structural adhesive bonding is under development for offshore applications and more specifically for fastener connection to existing steel structures. For this application, creep appears to be one of the main long-term phenomena that needs to be considered during the design approach. To investigate this issue, experimental creep investigations were realised at real scale for two bonded fastener geometries at different stress levels and under different load situations (tension and shear). Local measurements were carried out during these investigations to better describe the long-term behaviour of the bonded fasteners. Despite the non-uniform adhesive thickness in the assembly, numerical investigations have highlighted that the stress field mainly depends on the fastener geometry and the applied load level. This article is dedicated to the description of a methodology that relies on a precise inverse identification of creep parameters and on simplifying hypotheses on the stress field to be able to use simple analytical tools. The methodology enables to identify creep parameters much quicker than a method coupling an optimisation algorithm and a finite element analysis and could easily be used for more complex and precise models.

This paper investigates the creep behavior of adhesively bonded concrete/fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) joints, through experimental and modeling approaches. The first part proposes a methodology for predicting the long-term creep response of the bulk epoxy adhesive; such a procedure consists of (1) performing short-term tensile creep experiments at various temperatures and stress levels, (2) building the creep compliance master curves according to the time–temperature superposition principle in order to assess the long-term evolution for each stress level, and (3) developing a rheological model whose parameters are identified by fitting the previous master curves. In our case, it was found that master curves (and, consequently, parameters of the rheological model) are dependent on the applied stress level, highlighting the nonlinear creep behavior of the bulk epoxy adhesive. Therefore, evolution laws of the model parameters were established to account for this stress dependence. The second part focuses o...