Effect of adherend deflection on lap-shear tensile strength of laser-treated adhesive-bonded joints

Abstract Laser surface treatment was used as a surface preparation method for adherend prior to adhesive bonding, which significantly improved the fracture mode from mixed to cohesive and consequently increased the lap-shear tensile strength by 27.5% and 28.2% for aluminum alloys AA7075 and AA6022 adhesive-bonded joints, respectively. Nevertheless, the laser-treated AA7075 joint exhibited a 13.9% higher strength compared to laser-treated AA6022 joint although both joints showed cohesive fracture modes, which was attributed to smaller adherend deflection of laser-treated AA7075 joint than that of laser-treated AA6022 joint. Digital image correlation technique was applied to monitoring the deflections of laser-treated AA7075 and AA6022 joints during lap-shear tensile testing, and the stress analysis of adhesive-bonded lap-shear joints was conducted by finite element simulation. It was found that the deflection angle of the laser-treated AA6022 joint reached to 6.1° at the peak tensile load and was ∼69% larger than that of laser-treated AA7075 joint (i.e. 3.6°), which resulted in a mixed stress state with higher peel stress (i.e. ∼8 MPa) on edges of adhesive bonding region and consequently led to a premature fracture due to the low peel resistance of adhesive-bonded joints. Furthermore, the effect of decreased adherend deflection on lap-shear tensile strength was investigated, and a linear increase of lap-shear tensile strength was found with the decrease of deflection angle for adhesive-bonded joints showing cohesive fracture modes.