Static strength improvement of tubular aluminium adhesive joints by the outer chamfering technique

Tubular adhesive joints find applications in the piping industry, vehicle frames or thin-walled tubes, for instance, but they are seldom studied in the literature. This work numerically assesses the maximum load (P-m) of aluminium tubular joints, by using an outer chamfer in the tubes in the overlap region, after validation of the numerical tool with experiments. The numerical analysis consisted of using the Finite Element (FE) method to analyse peel (sigma(y)) and shear stresses (tau(xy)tau) in the adhesive layer and cohesive zone models (CZM) to predict P-m. The CZM technique was positively validated for the strength analysis of tubular joints. It was also shown that the chamfer highly affects the joints' behaviour, and that an optimal configuration exists that enables maximum P-m results. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.