Hugo C. Biscaia

The bonding technique has received extensive attention in the recent decades. Unlike the use of metallic screws, screws or rivets, some of the advantages of this bonding technique include the elimination of stress concentration, lighter weight and the extension of the life cycle of the adhesively bonded structures. The stiffness and strength of a material are increased after bonding with another reinforced material, but it can only be effective if the interface is able to transfer bond stresses. However, how the bond stress transfer is carried out when the joint, reinforcement and substrate are subjected to a thermal loading is not yet well understood. One way to facilitate and improve such knowledge is to develop analytical solutions that, despite their simplicity, allow parameters to be identified that may directly influence the bond between materials. Therefore, the present study aims to develop a series of closed-form solutions able to describe the debonding process of bonded joints with different characteristics using two different exponential softening laws. The results mainly describe the interfacial slips, bond stresses and strains in both materials during the temperature increase process. In total, 108 examples with different bonding conditions are studied and, at the same time, numerically modelled through the Finite Element Method (FEM). The numerical results were compared to the proposed closed-form solutions and a satisfactory agreement was obtained between the numerical and analytical results, validating the latter. When considered in the simulations, the glass transition temperature (Tg) of the adhesive greatly affected the bond stress transfer between materials and compromising the initial integrity of the adhesively bonded structure. © 2020

Pseudo-cyclic and cyclic loading were applied to CFRP-to-steel bonded joints built with two different CFRP laminates. In this paper, the strength capacity and bond-slip curves are presented and compared. The modes of failure are also described and associated with the types of material used, and the observed performances are correlated. The analysis of the results showed a threshold value for loading and amplitude level, below which the cyclic loading caused no detectable damage. For cycles above that limit, the region of the joints around the loaded end presented degradation reflected on the bond-slip stiffness and on the increase of residual deformation. It was found that the normalized dissipated energies either obtained from the bond-slip relationship or from the load-slip response had the same trend. The experimental data allowed also to establish a relationship between the damage developed within the interface and the normalized slip. A preliminary estimate of fatigue limit based on those data is suggested. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd

The degradation mechanisms of bonded joints between CFRP laminates and steel substrates under severe environmental conditions require more durability data and studies to increase the database and better understand their causes. Studies on bond properties of double-strap CFRP-to-steel bonded joints with two different composite materials as well as adhesive coupons subjected to freeze-thaw cycles for 10,000 h were conducted to reduce that gap. In addition, the equivalent to the number of thermal cycles and their slips induced in the CFRP laminates was replicated by an equivalent (mechanical) loading-unloading history condition imposed by a static tensile machine. The mechanical properties of the adhesive coupons and the strength capacity of the bonded joints were only slightly changed by the artificial aging. It was confirmed that the interfacial bond strength between CFRP and adhesive is critically related to the maximum shear stress and failure mode. The interfacial bond strength between adhesive and steel degraded with the aging. However, the equivalent thermal cyclic bond stress caused no detectable damage on the bond because only the interfacial elastic regime was actually mobilized, which confirmed that pure thermal cycles aging, per se, at the level imposed, have a low impact on the degradation of CFRP-to-steel bonded joints. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

The interfacial behaviour between ribbed steel rebars and concrete has been extensively studied because the contribution of the adherence between these two materials is of the utmost importance for the behaviour of Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures. The majority of the available studies on this topic indicate that the local adherence between these two materials can be defined through a bond-slip relationship, which is obtained with short embedded lengths. Although this seems to be widely accepted, some incoherencies, mainly regarding the local and the global detachment process in that “conventional theory”, are identified in the present work. To facilitate the understanding of the detachment process between a ribbed steel rebar and concrete, an analytical solution is developed. An experimental program with 33 pull-out tests covering three different ribbed steel rebars with different diameters and embedded lengths was carried out. Based on the experimental load–displacement at the pulled end responses, a new local bond-slip relationship with friction is proposed. In the end, the new bond-slip relationship, as well as other known relationships, is implemented into a Finite Element (FE) commercial code and the results are compared to the experimental data. Based on these preliminary results and up to the yielding point of the steel rebars, the new proposed local bond-slip model is the only one able to clearly distinguish and simulate either the local and the global performances of the tested specimens. © 2020 Institution of Structural Engineers