Robustness and reliability of simulation methods for adhesive joints with highstrengthsteel sheets at crash-conditions

The structural adhesive bonding with sheet steel plays an increasing and important role in automotive industry.Methods for design and simulation of bonded structures are necessary for new developments, especially for thecrash-case. Constitutive models for adhesives and simulation methods were developed and implemented in theresearch project presented in this paper, which allow the numerical simulation of the failure of adhesive jointsduring crash. Continuum mechanical models and simplified models with cohesive zone interface elements ensure acurrent application in the industry. The continuum mechanical approaches use physically motivated formulations aswell as combinations with empirical equations to consider the dependency of plasticity and failure on the strain rate.The simplest model uses a bi-linear material model with a fracture mechanical failure criterion. Furthermore, thedevelopments of the simulation techniques yielded a deeper and an improved in-sight into the high-speedexperiments to determine the parameters for the models. Special attention was taken to errors of measurementand other influencing quantities during identification of parameters and numerical simulation. Due to this thesimulation can be done for the best and the worst case and an assessment of the entire method is possible.