Numerical assessment of the Double-Cantilever Beam and Tapered Double-Cantilever Beam tests for the GIC determination of adhesive layers

Fracture mechanics-based techniques have become very popular in the failure prediction of adhesive joints. The most commonly used is cohesive zone modeling (CZM). For both conventional fracture mechanics and CZM, the most important parameters are the tensile and shear critical strain energy release rates (G(IC) and G(IIC), respectively). The most common tests to estimate G(IC) are the Double-Cantilever Beam (DCB) and the Tapered Double-Cantilever Beam (TDCB) tests. The main objective of this work is to compare the DCB and TDCB tests to obtain the G(IC) of adhesive joints. Three adhesives with varying ductilities were used to verify their influence on the precision of the typical methods of data reduction. For both tests, methods that do not need the measurement of crack length (a) were tested. A CZM analysis was considered to reproduce the experimental load-displacement (P-) curves and obtain the tensile CZM laws of each tested adhesive, to test the suitability of the data reduction methods, and to study the effect of the CZM parameters on the outcome of the simulations. The CZM models accurately reproduced the experimental tests and confirmed that the data reduction methods for the TDCB test tend to underestimate G(IC) for ductile adhesives.