Cure History Dependent Viscoelastic Modeling of Adhesively Bonded Joints using MAT_277 in LS-DYNA®

The effects of Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE) mismatch in multi-material adhesive joints, induced during the manufacturing process, are expected to hinder the peak performance of the adhesive in the service life of the vehicle. With a goal to estimate these effects, this paper attempts to model the curing phenomenon of an adhesive and predict its mechanical properties using MAT_277 material model available in LS-DYNA, which serves as a good starting point towards modeling the cure history dependent viscoelastic behavior of adhesives. The adhesive is used to join two substrates of dissimilar metals and tested to capture the relative displacement of substrates. The experiments are performed on a specialized setup, which is built to perform experiments on lap shear joints.