Abstract
Epoxy resins are widely employed as adhesives and are being increasingly used in engineering industries. The prediction of the strength of adhesively bonded components is vitally important and different approaches and methods are being used to investigate the fracture behaviour and predict the durability of adhesive joints when they are exposed to hostile environments. Typical accelerated ageing tests used in industrial laboratories employ adhesive joints immersed in water and subjected to static tensile stresses, where the fracture stress and the time to failure are measured in order to generate basic design data. However, in this type of work, fracture mechanics is a more useful technique. The present work is therefore concerned with the design and development of new accelerated ageing test equipment employing double-torsion adhesive joints exposed to moisture and static stresses. This allowed the determination of the fracture energy versus crack velocity and incubation time relations.
