DESIGN OF FRP/STEEL JOINTS BONDED BY THICK ADHESIVE LAYERS EXPERIMENTAL CHARACHTERIZATION AND NUMERICAL MODELLING USING DAMAGE MECHANICS

The use of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) laminates to strengthen and repair of steel beams has increased during the last decade and is tending to replace traditional methods, such as welding or bolting of additional steel plates. In this context, one of the issues, which require more research, is design of adhesive joints used to bond FRP laminates to steel substrates. This paper is mainly concerned with evaluation of damage mechanics-based approaches to predict the strength of adhesive joints used to bond FRP laminates to steel beams. Adhesively bonded CFRP/steel double-lap shear specimens are numerically modeled using cohesive zone modeling (CZM) and the results are compared with experiments. The input cohesive material data are obtained from three series of experiments. The results indicate that the proposed methodology to obtain fracture data results in good predictions using CZM. The prediction method presented in this paper could be used in practice to determine the strength of the adhesive joints in FRP bonded steel beams