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Mode I fracture toughness of asymmetric metal-composite adhesive joints

In this work, the mode I fracture toughness of dissimilar metal-composite adhesive joints is experimentally investigated using the double cantilever beam (DCB) test. The particular joint under study is resulted by the adhesive joining of a thin titanium sheet with a thin carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) laminate and is envisioned to be implemented in the hybrid laminar flow control system of future aircraft. Four different industrial technologies for the joining of the titanium and CFRP adherents are evaluated/compared; co-bonding with and without adhesive and secondary bonding using either thermoset or thermoplastic CFRP. The vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding (VARTM) technique is employed for the manufacturing of the panels. After manufacturing, the panels are cut into test specimens that, because they are too thin (approximately 2.4 mm thick), needed to be stiffened from both titanium and composite sides with two aluminum backing beams to ensure the non-yielding of the titanium during the subsequent DCB tests. Towards the determination of the fracture toughness of the joint from the experimental data, an analytical model recently developed by the authors, that considers the bending-extension coupling of both sub-laminates constituting the test specimen as well as the manufacturing-induced residual thermal stresses, is applied. For the four manufacturing options (MO) investigated, the load-displacement behaviors, failure patterns, and fracture toughness performances are presented and compared.