Abstract
In assembly lines of cars, very long handling arms consisting of aluminum alloy have been used to position windshields on the bodies. We developed new handing arms on which CFRP plates were bonded adhesively to reinforce their stiffness and to reduce their vibration. In this study, we investigated the influences of the thickness and width of the aluminum alloy adherends in the specimen on the fatigue life. Fatigue tests using four types of the smaller specimens having aluminum adherends of different thickness and width were carried out. Two S-N curves of the four types of the specimens were obtained based on the two stress values at several points far from the edges of the adhesive layer. As the result, we found that the fatigue life was influenced by the thickness of the aluminum alloy and that we had to predict the fatigue lives of the actual structures using stress values of adhesive layers.
