Approaches to predict the fatigue failure of bonded joints under operationally relevant conditions

Adhesive bonding technology plays a major role in enabling multi-material engineering structures with lightweight potential. However, there is still a lack of knowledge about how operational conditions can affect the failure of adhesive joints under fatigue loading. Moreover, cost-intensive fatigue experiments are a limiting factor in addressing multiple operational conditions simultaneously. The goal of the present work is to investigate approaches to predict the fatigue failure of bonded joints under operationally relevant conditions. The focus is to develop an understanding of the fatigue behavior of elastic and rigid bonding adhesives, whilst developing methods to reduce the number of experiments for the characterization of adhesives. In this work, the effect of multiaxial loading (considering non and proportional loading), varying mean stress, and stress concentrations are highlighted as operational-relevant conditions.