PERFORMANCE OF ADHESIVE STEEL-TO-STEEL CONNECTIONS UNDER PROLONGED LOADING

As construction moves towards modularization and prefabrication, adhered joints have become increasingly prevalent across civil infrastructure, particularly in automotive, naval, aerospace, engineered wood, and concrete industries. Adhered joints offer the benefits of easier application and continuity of the connection without inducing additional residual stress in the connections in the ways that traditional bolted and welded connections do. However, these benefits are largely ignored in the steel industry, in part due the lack of research on the behavior of adhesives in steel connections. This thesis discusses the success of structural adhesives in heavy structural settings, highlighting the opportunities for adhered joints in heavy structural connections, through an extensive review of test standards, research, and commercially available structural adhesives. From this review, preliminary statistical-analysis based design objectives for adhesive steel-to-steel connections were established. An experimental program was designed to evaluate the performance and behavior of five adhesives in steel-to-steel connections under a variety of sustained loads. Many of the tests in this series have been under load for over a year, thus, creep curves have been fit to the measured creep strains. Statistical analysis of these creep curves indicates the slope of the secondary creep region for all tests is near-zero, and that behavior at low and intermediate load levels is distinct from that of higher load levels.