Fatigue Characterization of a structural adhesive

During the last decades, adhesives have become more preponderant as serious options to traditional mechanical ways of bonding things together. From airplane engineering to construction the advantages of such technique have pushed the innovation and conducted to cost effective application. Since the 19th century, fatigue has become a central preoccupation in engineering research; initially for steel material and in a second time fatigue research went to the polymer industry and to adhesive applications. Throughout the panorama of fatigue researches on adhesive a small proportion is dedicated to bulk material. In fact, aerospace and automotive engineering focuses more on joint configuration studies as they are more easily correlated with practical application. Lately, interest on thicker bond-lines has emerged leading to studies on adhesives focusing on the bulk properties. This review work aims to present several reviews done on fatigue of adhesively jointed configuration and to extend the work by focusing on studies investigating the fatigue behaviour of bulk adhesive and thick adhesive joints.