Proceedings of the SEM Annual Conference

June 7-10, 2010 Indianapolis, Indiana USA

©2010 Society for Experimental Mechanics Inc.

Characterization of a structural adhesive by Digital Image Correlation

D. MORIN(a,b,c), G. HAUGOU(a,b,c), B. BENNANI(a,b,c), F. LAURO(a,b,c)

(a) Univ Lille Nord de France, F-59000 Lille, France

(b) UVHC, LAMIH, F-59313 Valenciennes, France
(c) CNRS, FRE 3304, FR-59313 Valenciennes, France
Corresponding author: franck.lauro@univ-valenciennes.fr

ABSTRACT

In the recent years, structural bonding takes an important place in assemblies techniques used for the automotive
design. The next step to optimize the use of adhesive in car structures is to realize accurate finite element
simulations of behaviour until failure of bonded joints. These kinds of calculations are only possible if fine
behaviour and failure models are provided into the finite element software. In these works, tests on bulk adhesive
specimens are realized to characterize the mechanical properties. 2D and 3D Digital Image Correlation are used
to investigate the behaviour and failure of the shear and tensile specimens.

I) Context

Nowadays structural bonding is widely used in automotive industry. This interest is focused on classical
advantages of structural bonding like stress concentration reduction and the possibility of join materials of
different nature but also on new applications like:

improvement of energy management of car structures,

reduction of number of spotweld.
For these use of bonding a new generation adhesive is designed by chemical industry. This adhesive defined as
crash-stable adhesive is based on a classical epoxy matrix toughened by addition of elastomers nodules. The
addition of polymer nodules confers to the epoxy matrix new mechanical properties [1] like:
visco-elasticity,
visco-plasticity,
non-isochoric plasticity and damage.
So as to take into account the adhesive in finite element simulation of car structures, fine behaviour and failure
model has to be provided. In the literature, the adhesive properties are generally identified on assemblies tests
with butt joint and single or double lap joint for tensile and shear properties respectively. Although these tests are

T. Proulx (ed.), Application of Imaging Techniques to Mechanics of Materials and Structures, Volume 4, Conference Proceedings of the 107
Society for Experimental Mechanics Series 14, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-9796-8_14, © The Society for Experimental Mechanics, Inc. 2013
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realized in conditions near those used in industry (same adherent material, thickness, chemical composition of the
surface …), the stress fields are always heterogenous inside the bonded joint and the mechanical response is
mainly controlled by the adherend properties [2,3]. Like the work of Goglio et al. [4], the properties identification is
then performed on bulk adhesive specimen in tension and shear on a wide range of strain rate (from 0.01 to 400
-1
s ). By using Digital Image Correlation, local information are extracted on these tests and a fine characterization
of the adhesive is performed.
II) Experimental set up

a) Specimen preparation

An original forming process is designed so as to obtain plates of pure adhesive. These plates are cured under an
heating press so as to control the pressure applied during curing (Figure 1). A water cutting technique is used so
as to avoid heating and crack initiation of classical machining technique.

Figure 1: aluminum mould (left) and heating press (right).

b) Loading devices

In order to cover a wide range of strain rates different loading devices are used:
-1
an electro-mechanical device for the low strain rate range (0.01 to 0.1 s ),
-1
a high-speed hydraulic machine for the middle strain rate range (0.1 to 100 s ),
-1
a set of pre-stressed Hopkinson bars for the high strain rate range (100 to 400 s ).
The shear loading is obtained by the Iosipescu test and due to the complexity of the clamping system is only
limited to static loading.

c) Geometries

The tensile specimen geometries are extracted from the NF-EN-ISO-527-3 (Figure 2). The effect of the triaxiality
stress ratio is studied by realizing test on notched tensile tests. The notched specimens geometries are derived
from the normative one (Figure 2).

Figure 2: geometry of tensile specimens (left) and notched specimens (right)

The geometry of the shear specimens is extracted from the ASTM-D6539 norm (Figure 3).
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Figure 3: geometry Iosipescu shear specimen

d) Measurement techniques

2D and 3D digital image correlations are used to identify the local strain fields in tensile, notched tensile and
shear tests. The strain fields are computed from the measured displacements fields using VIC 2D/3D software.
The image sequences are obtained both CCD and CMOS captors:
-1
2 CCD captors for the 2D D.I.C. at 10 f.s for the low strain rate range,
1 CMOS captor for the 2D D.I.C. at 50, 1000, 15000, 37500 f.s-1 for the middle and high strain rate
range.
For the D.I.C. calculations, the strains are computed with length scale of 0.3 mm. With this size of scale
heterogeneities in strain fields of notched and shear tests can be neglected.

III) Behaviour law

a) Tensile tests

The tensile behaviour laws are extracted using the SEƠ method [5], this technique used the heterogeneities of the
strain field to build a 3D behaviour surface in the true strain, true strain rate and true stress space. With this
method, the local stress field is computing between each subset of the D.I.C. calculations with the equation 1. In
this formula, an hypothesis on the behaviour in the thickness is needed.

(eq. 1)
Where F is the current load in the specimen, S0 the initial cross section and İ2 and İ3 the strains in the cross
section.
The transversal isotropy hypothesis which postulates that İ2 and İ3 are equal is validated by using 3D D.I.C.
measurements on both front and side of tensile specimens as shown in Figure 4. In this Figure a maximum
deviation of 300 ȝİ is observed between transversal strain of front and side of the specimen.

Figure 4: difference between front and side strain.

Figure 5 shows the results in terms of behaviour law, on these curves a high visco-plastic character is highlighted
but also softening after a certain amount of plastic strain. This softening is due to the transversal isotropy
hypothesis used for the thickness computations, when the behaviour laws are computed with the incompressibility
hypothesis (eq. 2) (Figure 6), the softening is not present.

(eq. 2)
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Figure 5: behaviour laws with the transversal isotropy hypothesis.

Figure 6: behaviour laws with the incompressibility hypothesis.

b) Shear tests

Before to present results in term of plasticity on the Iosipescu tests, the quality of the shear loading is
investigated. This quality is quantified on two levels with the D.I.C. measurements. Firstly, in a shear loading the
principal vectors of the diagonalized strain tensor are placed at ±45° of the neutral axis of the specimen. As
shown in Figure 7 this requirement is reached. The last requirement is that principal strains have to be of the
same magnitude. Figure 8 shows that this requirement is not reached until the failure of the specimen so a
confidence interval has to be provided on the behaviour law in shear.
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Figure 7: principal vectors of the diagonalized strain tensor.

Figure 8: study of the magnitude of the principal strains.

The behaviour law shown in Figure 9 is computed with:

(eq. 3)
where F is the current load in the specimen and S0 the initial cross section.

Figure 9: behaviour law in shear and confidence interval.

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c) Damage

Damage evolution is investigated using the plastic Poisson ratio extracted with D.I.C. from tensile and notched
tensile tests. As shown in Figure 10, the plastic Poisson ratio is never equal to 0.5 which proves that plasticity is
not at constant volume moreover plastic Poisson ratio decreases with the increase of longitudinal strain which
highlight a damage evolution.

Figure 10: evolution of plastic Poisson ratio.

The damage evolution is extracted from the previous plastic Poisson ratio evolution with equations 4 and 5. The
influence of triaxiality stress ratio is highlighted on Figure 11 and can not be neglected in future damage models.

(eq. 4)

(eq.5)

Figure 11: damage evolution.

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IV) Failure

a) Tensile and notched tensile tests

The equivalent strain used for the failure characterization is computed following the transversal isotropy
hypothesis which leads to a strain tensor of the following form:

(eq .6)

and the strain rate is computed using a backward finite difference.

Figure 12 and 13 show the evolution of failure strain in function of strain rate for the tensile and notched tensile
tests respectively, in both of case a high strain rate dependency is highlighted. Moreover here again the triaxiality
stress ratio has a strong influence on the value and on the evolution of the equivalent failure strain.

Figure 12: evolution of equivalent failure strain in function of strain rate for the tensile tests.

Figure 13: evolution of equivalent failure strain in function of strain rate for the notched tensile tests.
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b) Shear tests

For the shear tests, the equivalent strain is computed using the following form of the strain tensor:

(eq .7).

The strain rate at failure is also computed by a backward finite difference.

The results in term of equivalent failure strain shown in Figure 14 highlight a high dispersion. This dispersion
comes from the initial position of the specimen which is not the same for each test and also the failure
phenomenon which is always submitted to a natural dispersion.

Figure 14: dispersion of equivalent failure strain in shear tests.

V) Conclusions et perspectives

With the increasing use of structural bonding in automotive, fine characterizations of behaviour and failure of
structural adhesive are needed. This works brings this fine characterization by the study of tensile, notched tensile
tests and shear tests on a wide range of strain rate and using non contact measurement method like 2D and 3D
Digital Image Correlation. The SEƠ method is successfully applied on this kind of material and a wide database of
true stress / true strain curves at constant strain rate are available to realize the identification of a visco-plastic
behaviour model. A fine study of the shear Iosipescu test is realized with 3D D.I.C. and this test is not suitable to
obtain pure shear loading until the failure of the specimen. An innovative damage measurement is also realized
and the influence of the triaxiality stress ratio is then quantified. The failure of the adhesive is investigated with
D.I.C. measurements for different triaxiality stress ratio but also on a wide range of strain rates, this database is
available for the identification of a triaxiality stress ratio and strain rate dependent criterion. Finally the results
obtained have a high impact on the finite element modeling due to the lack of models which can tackle the
previous identified properties.

Acknowledgments

The present research work has been supported by International Campus on Safety and Intermodality in
Transportation, the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Region, the European Community, the Regional Delegation for Research
and Technology, the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, and the National Center for Scientific Research.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of these institutions. The authors would like to acknowledge the
support of DOW AUTOMOTIVE for the supply of the adhesive.
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