Numerical and experimental investigation on lap shear fracture of Al/CFRP laminates

Abstract This paper presents a new approach to numerically investigate the lap shear fracture of a hybrid laminate made of Carbon Fibre Reinforced Plastic (CFRP) and metal foil plies (e.g. aluminium), validated by corresponding experiments. The numerical Finite Element (FE) model of the hybrid laminate, subjected to lap shear fracture, is composed of five laminas with alternating metal/CFRP layers with cohesive elements lying within Al/CFRP interface. In the FE model, individual CFRP laminas are assumed as an orthotropic homogenized continuum under plane stress, and aluminium facesheets are modelled as an elastic–plastic continuum. The Al/CFRP interface is represented via quadratic cohesive elements, the constitutive law of which is an exponentially decaying law representing the degrading behaviour of the interface (implemented as user element in ABAQUS). The numerical model captures the experimentally obtained results with minimal error, and predicts the failure modes successfully. The influence of specimen geometry (e.g. overlap length, total length, and total width) on lap shear fracture response is analyzed in detail in this study, too, in order to confirm the specimen design for the test, as there is still no corresponding test standard for hybrid laminates.