Engineering adhesive joints are being increasingly used in industry because of the advantages they offer over other joining methods such as fastening or welding. The development and the use of adhesives in a design environment require accurate mechanical tests in order to measure their strength and toughness. Standard techniques such as the shear lap test are commonly used to measure shear strength, but the results they produce generally depend on geometry and on initial defects within the bond line. Fracture tests such as the double cantilever beam (DCB) tests overcome these limitations, but rely on elasticity models and assumptions to determine toughness. In this study, we present a novel technique to directly determine the mode I fracture toughness of engineering adhesive joints as well as their full cohesive law, without any initial assumption on its shape. Our new method is remarkably simple in terms of experimental setup, execution and analysis. It is similar to the standard double cantilever beam (DCB) test with the difference that the material and dimensions of the beams are chosen so that they are assumed to be rigid compared to the bond line. In this rigid DCB (RDCB) technique the crack opening is known everywhere along the interface, which we use to compute the cohesive law of the adhesive directly from the load-displacement data obtained from experiment and the geometry of the RDCB specimen. The RDCB method is validated and applied to three typical commercial adhesives (polyurethane, epoxy, and silicone), to determine their cohesive law and fracture toughness.
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