Pull-out Tension and Flexural Capacity of Adhesively Jointed Steel Plates under Different Temperature

Adhesive bonding has established a remarkable interest in civil construction industry because
of its proven success and wide application in aerospace and automotive industry. In fact, the
application of adhesive has existed in construction of civil engineering facilities since 1960s
in which the major application dominated by the segmental construction, externally-bonded
reinforcement, structural repairs to concrete and also non-structural application. However,
lack of design code and comprehensive research related to the use of adhesive bonding in
load-bearing connections made this method of joining less attractive. Therefore, this
experimental research was conducted to study the pull-out tension and flexural capacity of
adhesively jointed steel plates. The effects of some of the critical variables on the
performance of adhesive joint were investigated namely the overlapping length, curing
temperature and joint configuration particularly single-lap joint, single-strap joint and
double-strap joint. Only one type of commercially available structural adhesive namely
Sikadur®-30 was used to join the lOOmm wide steel strips. It was observed from the test
results that the stiffness and load carrying capacity of adhesive joints subjected to pull-out
tension increases with decrease in overlapping length. Investigation the effects of the curing
temperature; it was noted that at 45°C the adhesive was fully cured. On the other hand, the
double-strap joint has shown much higher loading capacity under all loading conditions such
as pull-out tension and bending. It has performed best amongst the three other types of joint
designs investigated. The available results of this research study is a primary effort in order
to establish the future research studies for adoption of adhesive joints as structural connection
in the global construction industry.