Experimental Investigation on Adhesive Bonded Joints of Carbon Fiber Composite Laminates Containing Disbond Defect Available to Purchase

Adhesive bonding technology is widely used for connecting composite pipes recent years, for the adhesive joints have many advantages such as weight reduction, ease of manufacture, and more importantly, uniform stress distribution and less stress concentration within the joint region. Nevertheless, one of the limitations of adhesive joints is the difficulty in predicting the joint strength due to the presence of defects in the adhesive due to improper curing process. This paper presents an experimental study of single-lap joints with disbond defects at the adherend-adhesive interface. Different sets of adhesively-bonded singlelap joints containing varied disbond conditions were prepared and tested. The joints used carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) laminates as substrates and epoxy resin as adhesive, with ultrathin aluminum foil (10um) as disbond defects in different sizes and locations. The full deformation fields were measured using the digital image correlation (DIC) method. The samples were subjected to tensile load till failure to determine the bond strength. Before the tensile test, the defective adhesive joints were detected by a phased-array ultrasonic instrument to identify the bond-line quality of joints. The results show that the disbond defects can be detect by ultrasonic phased-array technique, and the detriment of disbond defect to the failure process can be observed and recorded by DIC system. Based on the findings, the failure modes and failure mechanism of bonded CFRP joint were further discussed.