Assessment of interface failure behaviour for brittle adhesive using the three-point bending test

Abstract In the framework of the adhesive bonding, the assessment of interfacial properties has an essential role in determining the adhesive joints' global responses. Various surface preparations are available for each type of metallic substrate. There are plenty of tests widely used for mechanical characterisation to determine the adhesive properties and few tests to assess interfacial properties. For such a case, a specific three-point bending test can be applied to examine the interactions between adhesive and substrate. On the other hand, a direct comparison of the critical force is not always possible because of geometrical incompatibility. A practical solution for the last issue is applying a coupled stress-energy criterion (CC) since the interface properties are independent of the substrate thickness. Hence, CC and the macro-element technique were applied to determine the interfacial properties using an aluminium alloy 2024-T3 as substrate and the adhesive DGEBA/DETA™ under many preparation conditions. As a result, the three-point bending test's overall behaviour was established in terms of interface strength (adherence), including incremental energy release rate and critical stress. Thus, this paper can be read as the first work towards the ability to predict the interface failure in the frame of three-point bending test using different geometries. In conclusion, the occurrence of an adhesive or cohesive failure and the unstable or a stable failure propagation of the bonded joints were sorted and classified as a function of interface properties.