Fatigue Life Prediction of Composite Adhesive Joints using LS-DYNA®

Composite and adhesive joints are used increasingly in the automotive industry and an active research area is the fatigue analysis of adhesive joints. In this paper, a methodology to predict the fatigue life of adhesive joint is proposed and implemented into LS-DYNA with the joint modeled using a user-defined cohesive material. Fatigue crack growth rate is used to obtain the fatigue damage accumulation rate in cohesive zone model. Our method is verified by numerical simulations of two commonly used adhesive joints in the automotive industry: single lap joint and stepped lap joint. The predicted S-N curve fits well with the experimental data.