Adhesive joints have become an important and useful method in bonding similar and dissimilar structural materials in many industries. In order to characterize strength of an adhesive joint, apart from material properties of the adhesive or resin, geometry and mechanics of the joint and type of fracture plays an important role. The objective of this work is to study the effect of different cohesive parameters and substrate’s height, on the behavior of a steel-to-GFRP composite bi-material interface by using numerical simulations. A DCB and ENF model has been created in Ansys FEM software and results for each case have been presented. Future work needs to be done towards validating the numerical models through experimental tests.

A Parametric study on the effect of different cohesive zone parameters and heights of substrates for mode I and II crack propagation through simulation of DCB and ENF test configurations have been carried and results are compared with closed form solutions for each case.