A parametric investigation of the response of directly laminated composite-to-metal single lap joints

Adhesive bonding is a rapidly growing technique that offers considerable potential to the repairing and joining of structural members. This work has been performed within the context of FP7 Co-Patch research program and presents a parametric experimental study of adhesively bonded single lap joint geometries between dissimilar materials, namely typical marine steel and carbon fiber reinforced polymers, using the co-curing technique i.e. by directly laminating the composite on the steel. Four different geometry cases with varying overlap and substrate lengths and five different composite material systems were considered and experimentally tested. It may be concluded that the failure load of the joints increased with the increase of the overlap length. The magnitude of this increase is strongly dependant on the quality of bonding over the overlap length, which in turn is associated with the fabrication method, rather than the mechanical properties of the composite material system