The automobile industry is seeing an increased need for the application of plastics and their derivatives in various forms such as fiber reinforced plastics, in the design and manufacture of various automotive structural components, to reduce weight, cost and improve fuel efficiency. A lot of effort is being directed at the development of structural plastics, to meet specific automotive requirements such as stiffness, safety, strength, durability and environmental standards and recyclability.
Fiber reinforced plastics being viscoelastic in behavior, are susceptible to the rate of loading or the strain rate, especially at high temperature conditions. Bonded sections made up of fiber reinforced plastics therefore require the understanding of their mechanical behavior at different strain rates, such as low rate loading (to simulate quasi-static loading) and high strain rate loading (to simulate impact type loading). It is also important to understand the strain rate effects at different temperature conditions, since mechanical properties of fiber reinforced plastic sections are also influenced by temperature
This paper is an attempt at developing a test methodology for testing of adhesively bonded fiber reinforced plastic sections, under different temperature conditions and at different loading rates. The test data are then correlated with mathematical models being developed for modeling the adhesive joints to accurately represent the mechanical behavior of such bonded sections at different load rates and temperature conditions. The data also can be used to control the actual adhesive bonding process in terms of obtaining good quality bonds during manufacture of adhesively bonded large injection molded automotive body panels.