Determination of fracture toughness of an adhesive in civil engineering and interfacial damage analysis of carbon fiber reinforced polymer–steel structure bonded joints

Carbon fiber reinforced polymer–steel structural bonded joints are often subject to mixed-mode loading i.e. coupling action of normal and shear stress occurs in the joints. In this paper, an experimental approach based on fracture mechanics was adopted to obtain the fracture toughness (G ΙC and G ΙΙC ) of an adhesive currently employed in civil engineering applications, with the corresponding pure cohesive models verified by numerical results....