ABSTRACT
Adhesive-bonding for the unions in structures is a choice to consider over welding, riveting and fastening, due to issues such as the reduction of stress concentrations, reduced weight penalty and easy manufacturing/automation. As the integrity of bonded structures is usually determined by the strength and durability of their bonds it is vital for the design of these structures, the availability of numerical methods and damage models that can be reliably employed to predict their fracture behaviour, to minimize design costs and time to market. The chapter aims to assess the eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM) feasibility to model crack propagation and to predict the fracture behaviour of adhesively-bonded joints. The XFEM considers an initial linear elastic behaviour of the materials, which is represented by an elastic constitutive matrix that relates stresses with the normal and shear separations of the cracked elements.
