Development of a Drop Weight Machine for Adhesive Joint Testing

Adhesive materials are increasingly being considered as one of the best methods for joining parts with dissimilar characteristics. This is mostly due to the advantages they offer when compared with other joining processes, such as fastening, riveting, or welding. Adhesives provide high mechanical strength, contribute to lighter structures, and can be applied on surfaces with complex geometries. This set of properties is highly sought out in the automotive and aerospace industries. However, to ensure vehicle safety, the crashworthiness of adhesively bonded structures must be assessed to guarantee that they can withstand high impact loads and also absorb the energy involved. Therefore, it is important to follow the rising interest in this type of bonding with experimental data that help to understand adhesives’ behavior under impact conditions. In this article, a new drop weight impact test machine is proposed and its main features are highlighted, namely, the rotational anti-rebound subsystem and the U-shaped impactor, which are specifically designed to test adhesive joints. Experimental results of impact tests are presented, and the drop weight machine behavior is validated using numerical data.