On the Use of a Driven Wedge Test to Acquire Dynamic Fracture Energies of Bonded Beam Specimens

A driven wedge test is used to characterize the mode I fracture resistance of adhesively bonded composite beam specimens over a range of crosshead rates up to 1m/s. The shorter moment arms (between wedge contact and crack tip) significantly reduce inertial effects and stored energy in the debonded adherends, when compared with conventional means of testing double cantilever beam (DCB) specimens. This permitted collecting an order of magnitude more crack initiation events per specimen than could be obtained with end-loaded DCB specimens bonded with an epoxy exhibiting significant stick-slip behavior. The localized contact of the wedge with the adherends limits the amount of both elastic and kinetic energy, significantly reduces crack advance during slip events, and facilitates higher resolution imaging of the fracture zone with high speed imaging. The method appears to work well under both quasi-static and high rate loading, consistently providing substantially more discrete fracture events for specimens exhibiting pronounced stick-slip failures. Deflections associated with beam transverse shear and root rotation for the shorter beams were not negligible, so simple beam theory was inadequate for obtaining qualitative fracture energies. Finite element analysis of the specimens, however, showed that fracture energies were in good agreement with values obtained from traditional DCB tests. The method holds promise for use in dynamic testing and for characterizing bonded or laminated materials exhibiting significant stick slip behavior, reducing the number of specimens required to characterize a sufficient number of fracture events.