• Failure Criteria of Adhesives
• Dynamic Performance of Adhesively Bonded Joints
• Combined cyclic loading in hostile environments
• Deformation by Cavitation
• Flexible Adhesives

• Standards Bodies
• Research and Technology Organisations
• Adhesive Suppliers

The PAJ extension programme was formulated to complete research investigation on best practice for modelling adhesives.

Modern toughened adhesives developed to have improved impact resistance properties are highly non-linear materials that could not be modelled accurately using standard linear elastic models. Greater understanding of representing toughened-adhesives using elastic-plastic material models has led to new functions that predict large-strain plastic yielding caused by voiding of the rubber phase. New and improved test methods for accurately obtaining the required material properties have been developed and used to obtain the engineering properties of structural adhesives over ranges of temperature and strain rate.

The modelling and engineering properties of flexible adhesives have previously received little attention in comparison to those of structural adhesives. These can be considered as having rubber-like hyperelastic properties. Determination of input data suggested for FE software required the development of uniaxial, planar and biaxial tension test methods. Flexible adhesives were also found to be compressible and therefore methods for measuring volumetric properties were established. Validation studies on the use of hyperelastic material models for predicting joint performance demonstrated that it was possible to obtain all the required test data from the uniaxial tension test alone with little loss of prediction accuracy.