ABSTRACT
Adhesive bonding is a material joining process in which an adhesive, placed between the adherend surfaces, solidifies to produce an adhesive bond. Adhesively bonded joints are an increasing alternative to mechanical joints in engineering applications and provide many advantages over conventional mechanical fasteners. Among these advantages are lower structural weight, lower fabrication cost and improved damage tolerance. The Finite Element method is a numerical analysis procedure that provides an approximate solution to problems in various felds of engineering. Ashcroft gives a description of the method applied to adhesive joints. The FE method is based on the idea of building a complicated object with simple blocks or dividing a complicated object into small and manageable pieces. Advanced modelling techniques are required that comprise accurate failure predictions, surpassing the aforementioned limitations associated to the continuum and fracture mechanics approaches, to effectively model damage evolution within a material or structure with bonded components.
