Creep analysis of adhesively bonded single lap joint using finite element method

Adhesive joints are being used widely in engineering industries due to the increasing demand for designing lightweight structures. Because of the physical properties of the most adhesives, they creep even at room temperature. Therefore, the creep behavior of a single lap adhesive joint is studied in this paper. For this purpose, using the experimental data, creep constitutive equations for the adhesive has been obtained. Then, these equations have been employed to investigate the creep behavior of the joint. The results show that due to the creep straining, the stresses in the joint corners, decrease. However, creep strain accumulates in these areas which this in turn may lead to separation of adhesive from adherent. In order to eliminate the effect of strain accumulation, two modifying methods have been proposed in this paper: increasing the layer thickness and using filleted joints.