Experimental study of the influence of the surface preparation on the fatigue behavior of polyamide single lap joints

The low quality of adhesion performance on polymeric surfaces has forced the development of specific pretreatments able to toughen the interface between substrate and adhesive. Among these methods, atmospheric pressure plasma treatment (APPT) appears particularly suitable for its environmental compatibility and its effectiveness in altering the chemical state of the surface. In this work, an experimental study on adhesively bonded joints realized using polyamide as substrates and polyurethane as the structural adhesive was carried out with the intent to characterize their fatigue behavior, which represents a key issue of such joints during their working life. The single lap joint (SLJ) geometry was chosen and several surface pretreatments were compared with each other: degreasing, abrasion (alone and followed by APPT) and finally APPT. The results show that the abrasion combined with APPT presents the most promising behavior, which appears consistent with the higher percentage of life spent for crack propagation found by means of DIC on this class of joints with respect to the others. APPT alone confers a good fatigue resistance with respect to the simple abrasion, especially at a low number of cycles to failure.