Assessment of interfacial energy effect on finite fracture behavior of composite adhesively bonded joints under four-point bending

Due to their remarkable advantages, composite adhesively bonded joints are intensively used in many engineering fields. There are many investigations performed by researchers to study the fracture behavior of the adhesively bonded joints. However, there exist discrepancies between the numerical predictions and the experimental results in some cases. This paper reports an investigation on the finite fracture behavior of composite adhesively bonded joints subjected to four-point bending. Experiments are performed for composite adhesively bonded joints with four different configurations. The fracture behavior is observed experimentally by utilizing a high-speed camera. The failure analysis employing the energy-stress coupled criterion is performed. The experimental results are compared with the numerical predictions by using an experimental-based approach where both geometric nonlinearity and interfacial energy are considered. Numerical illustrations are carried out to assess the effect of interface energy, geometric nonlinearity, joint type and dimensions on the fracture behavior of the considered bonded joints.