Tensile Strength of Adhesively Bonded and Hybrid (Bonded/Riveted) Dissimilar Single-Lap Joints

Glass fiber-reinforced composites are commonly employed as structural materials in many fields. In addition, glass fiber-reinforced composites are frequently used with metals, particularly in the automotive and aerospace industry. In this context, the tensile strengths of simple and hybrid single-lap joints having similar (i.e., aluminum/aluminum and composite/composite) and dissimilar (i.e., aluminum/composite) plates were investigated experimentally in this study. At this point, 6061 aluminum alloy and E-glass/epoxy composite plates were used as the adherends and Araldite 2014-1 was used as the adhesive. The composite adherends produced using the vacuum infusion technique consist of E-glass/epoxy laminates with [0°/90°/+45°/−45°]6 stacking sequence. Two different types of joints (i.e., adhesively bonded and bonded/riveted) were employed for similar and dissimilar joints. In addition, both 3-rivet and 4-rivet joints were used in bonded/riveted joints. The results revealed that the strength of the joints could be considerably increased with the addition of rivets to the adhesively bonded joints. In particular, the results showed that the strength value of the bonded/4-riveted joint is 5.7 times higher than the adhesively bonded joints.