Detailed Analysis Of A Complex Bonded Joint

The motivation for this research was the discovery that strength of material analyses of bonded joints was overly conservative. The objective of this paper was to evaluate both stress- and interlaminar-fracture-based analysis methods based on detailed finite-element (FE) models for static and fatigue loading. It was found that detailed FE analysis generally yielded lower percentage errors, suggesting either (a) that predicted stresses from a detailed FE analysis were either lower than the typical strength-of-materials-based approach for the same location and failure mode; (b) different, more localized, failure modes and locations were interrogated in the detailed analyses; or (c) both. However, detailed local modeling techniques do seem to be quite sensitive to small changes in input data, modeling approach, or both.