Mixed-mode fatigue and fracture behavior of adhesively-bonded composite joints

The mixed-mode fatigue and fracture behaviors of adhesively-bonded pultruded glass fiber-reinforced polymer joints are presented in this chapter. These behaviors are based on experimental investigations using asymmetric mixed-mode bending specimens. In such specimens, the crack propagated along paths outside the symmetry plane, and therefore mode partitioning could not be performed in the standardized way as for symmetric specimens. Existing techniques for the characterization of the mixed-mode fracture behavior of adhesively-bonded joints, the partitioning of the fracture mode components, and the modeling of the fiber bridging that affects the total fracture energy are presented in this chapter