Simulation of ductile adhesive failure with experimentally determined cohesive law

This paper aims to improve the numerical modelling for ductile adhesive bonded joints. The adhesive response directly measured from experiments, and bilinear cohesive laws of different modifications are employed for mixed mode fracture simulations. The performance of these cohesive laws is evaluated with the global failure behaviour of the bonded structures. The local damage progress near the crack tip is also investigated in details. It is found that the cohesive strength is vital for ductile adhesive simulation. The damage evolution within the failure process zone can be significantly influenced by cohesive stiffness. The experimentally determined cohesive law showed good performance in all simulations. Adjusting stiffness on the basis of true adhesive strength is recommended to improve the performance of bilinear cohesive laws. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.