Fatigue Performance Analysis of Adhesive-bonded Composite Joints Considering Size Effect

Abstract

Adhesive bonding failure is one of the main failure modes threatening the safety of the wind turbine blade (WTB), which drives fatigue performance analysis of adhesive bonding becoming a vital issue. Attributed to the high cost and sample scarcity of full-scale structural testing of WTBs, fatigue analysis of adhesive-bonded composite joints becomes a critical way to investigate the bonding properties. Adhesive bonding distributes in WTB with different sizes; thus, the fatigue performance in different place have a large difference. The existing researches mainly perform fatigue properties studies on the standard specimens, while the effects of bonding size on structural fatigue properties are ignored. With these concerns, a finite element method based on Cyclic Cohesive Zone Model theory is proposed, and size effects on fatigue properties are studied for adhesive-bonded composite joints in this paper. The results can be used for fatigue performance analysis for WTB adhesive bonding.