Creep Behaviour and Tensile Response of Adhesively Bonded Polyethylene Joints: Single-Lap and Double-Strap

TL;DR

This study investigates the static and creep behaviours of adhesively bonded polyethylene joints, comparing single-lap and double-strap configurations through experiments and finite element simulations to assess their performance and durability.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive experimental and numerical analysis of polyethylene adhesive joints, highlighting the effects of joint configuration and overlap length on static and creep performance.

Findings

Double-strap joints show shorter elongations under creep conditions.

Static failure load increases with overlap length, up to 10%.

Numerical models accurately predict experimental results.

Abstract

The static and time-dependent behaviours of adhesively bonded polyethylene Double-Strap (DS) joints were investigated to assess the viability of this joint configuration relative to the Single-Lap (SL) joints. Both experiments and finite element simulations are conducted. First, we individually characterise the tensile and creep behaviour of the adhesive and adherent materials; an epoxy-based adhesive and polyethylene, respectively. This information is used to develop suitable constitutive models that are then implemented in the commercial finite element package ABAQUS by means of user material subroutines, UMATs. The numerical models are used to design the creep tests on the adhesive joints. Afterwards, an extensive experimental campaign is conducted where we characterise the static and creep behaviour of two joint configurations, SL and DS joints, and three selected values of the overlap length. In regard to the static case, results reveal an increase in the failure load with increasing overlap length, of up to 10% for an overlap length of 39 mm. Also, slightly better performance is observed for the SL joint configuration. For the creep experiments, we show that the DS adhesive joint configuration leads to much shorter elongations, relative to the SL joints. These differences diminish with increasing overlap length but remain substantial in all cases. In both joint configurations, the elongation increases with decreasing overlap length. For instance, increasing the overlap length to 39 mm led to a 50% and a 30% reduction in elongation for SL and DS joints, respectively. Moreover, the numerical predictions show a good agreement with the experiments. The stress redistribution is investigated and it is found that the shear stress is highly sensitive to the testing time, with differences being more noticeable for the DS joint system.