Strength prediction and stress analysis of adhesively bonded composite joints using meshless methods

The applications of adhesive joints have grown in recent years in various industries, ranging from automotive to maritime. Compared to traditional joining techniques, such as bolts, welding or riveting, adhesive bonding has some advantages, namely, they are low weight, have high strength and have a more uniform stress distribution. However, they also have some disadvantages, many times they are impossible to disassemble, they have low peel strength and some adhesive require high curing temperatures. A particular advantage of using adhesives in composite joints is that they do not require holes in the composite to join the joint, which are associated with delamination failure. The present work aims at using radial point interpolation meshless methods to study the stress distributions and predict the strength of composite adhesive single lap joints (SLJ). To this effect, a brittle adhesive was tested in composite joints with varying overlap lengths (LO). The stress distribution obtained using meshless methods was compared to one obtained using the well-established Finite Element Method (FEM), resulting in a similar behaviour. The strength predictions, using the critical longitudinal strain (CLS) criterion, were similar to the experimental joint strength.