ABSTRACT
Adhesive bonded joints have become more effcient in due to the developments in adhesive technology, which has resulted in higher peel and shear strengths and also in allowable ductility up to failure. As a result of the reported improvement in the mechanical characteristics of adhesives, adhesive bonding has progressively replaced traditional joining methods such as bolting or riveting. In the continuum mechanics approach, the maximum values of stress, strain or strain energy, predicted by the Finite Element analyses, are usually used in the failure criterion and are compared with the corresponding material allowable values. Initially, the maximum principal stresses were proposed for very brittle materials whose failure mode is at right angles to the direction ofmaximum principal stress. Continuum mechanics assumes that the structure and its material are continuous. Defects or two materials with re-entrant corners obviously are not consistent with such an assumption.
