Effects of adherend material thickness on the adhesively bonded joints subject to full variable fatigue load

Adhesive bonded joints are used in many engineering applications that is recently the most important areas of use are aerospace and automotive industries. Adhesive joints used in aerospace are generally subject to dynamic loading. It is known that the thickness of the adhesive and adherend material bonded has a significant effect on the damage load of the bond in single lap joints combined with adhesive subjected to dynamic loads. In this thesis, first the static strength and then the fully variable tensile and four-point bending fatigue properties of the single lap bonding joints, which were created using the adherend material with thickness of 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 mm, were experimentally investigated. AA2024-T3 aluminum alloy used in the aerospace industry as the adherend material and DP460 structural and Araldite 2015 adhesives were used as the adhesive. According to the results of the study, it was observed that as the thickness of the adherend material increased, the static tensile and bending strength of the single lap joints increased. In addition, it has been experimentally obtained that the increase in adherend material thickness contributes significantly to the fatigue strength of single lap joints.