Issue 49

F.J.P. Moreira et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 49 (2019) 435-449; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.49.42 439 Figure 2 : Representative geometry and dimensions of the T-joints. N UMERICAL WORK Numerical simulation details he analysis performed in Abaqus ® was 2D, considering a geometrically non-linear FEM formulation. The aluminium adherends (both base and L-parts) were modelled as solids with the plastic behaviour defined in a previous work for the same material [27]. The adhesive layer was also modelled with solid elements, but with enriched XFEM formulation. The XFEM model is presented in the next Section. In all cases, 4-node solid elements with plane-strain conditions were used (with Abaqus ® reference CPE4). A perfect adhesion was considered in the models between the adherends and adhesive, since the models were built as a single part with different partitions and materials. Two types of meshes were applied: a more refined mesh to perform a stress analysis in the elastic domain, such that the stress plots are accurate, and a less refined mesh to promote the XFEM failure analysis. Fig. 3 shows an example of mesh refinement for a T-joint with t P2 =1 mm, with details at the loaded overlap edge for the stress and failure analyses. Figure 3 : Mesh details at x/L O =0 for the joint with t P2 =1 mm: stress analysis and XFEM strength prediction analyses. T