SURFACE ADHESIVE JOINT DESCRIPTION WITH COUPLED ELASTIC-PLASTIC DAMAGE BEHAVIOR AND NUMERICAL APPLICATIONS

This paper is concerned with the derivation and numerical treatment of a surface model of an adhesive joint where the constitutive behaviour of the adhesive material is given by a coupled elastic-plastic damage law. The adhesive layer is assumed to be thin and flexible compared t o the bodies joined. Simplifications indicated by these properties ena ble a treatment of the adhesive layer as a material surface. A finite element discretization is performed and a solution scheme based on New ton's method is utilized. The integration of the constitutive law is p erformed by a three-step operator splitting method. An important conse quence of the use of a constitutive law including damage is that a max imum load-carrying capacity of the joint can be obtained from the glob al load-displacement relation, i.e. as a part of the solution to the p roblem. This is demonstrated in two applications.