An Investigation on the Effect of Adherent Thickness on FailureLoads in an Adhesive Joint

In this paper, the effect of adherent thickness (T) on the failure loads of single lap adhesive joints has been investigated in two parts, based on a new failure criterion. At the first part, the failure loads of single lap adhesivejoints with similar geometries but different bonding lengths are predicted based on the new method. According to the criterion, the joints will fail if the longitudinal strain along the adhesive mid-plane reaches a critical value at a criticaldistance. The critical longitudinal strain and the critical distance are the two material and geometrical constants. In the second part, the method is employed to predict the failure load of single lap adhesive joints with similar geometries but different adherent thicknesses and bonding lengths. According to the results, the critical strain changes for differentvalues of adherent thickness but the critical distance remains constant. It is shown that the predictions based on the proposed criterion have good agreement with the experimental data.