Modeling and Analysis of Adhesively Bonded Joints with Interface Elements for Crash Analysis

Structural bonding with polymer adhesives is becoming more and more accepted in automotive applications in recent years. The development of ductile adhesives, so-called crash-resistant adhesives, aims towards guaranteeing the integrity of structural bonding during large deformations. But there is still a lack of efficient, numerical methods for the simulation of bonded car structures in crashworthiness calculations. In this contribution the adhesive layers are described by interface elements, which original were developed for the description of delamination processes in composite materials. Instead of an approximation of the three-dimensional stress and strain state by continuum elements, the adhesive is discretized by interface elements, which describe the effective in-situ behaviour of the adhesive between two adherents. Therefore, the constitutive behaviour must be formulated between the interface tractions and the displacement jumps, which represent the differences of the displacement at the surfaces of the adherents. The theoretical background is given in the presentation to explain the modelling approach and first results for the softening of adhesively bonded plates are given.

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