Adhesion and delamination boundary conditions for elastic plates with arbitrary contact shape

The adhesion of two heterogeneous, thin-walled structures is shown to be controlled by a boundary condition that balances mechanical energies with the work of adhesion at the edge of the contact zone. This boundary condition is well-known in fracture mechanics but is here rederived with plate theory and represented in a form that is easy to use. This formulation is applicable either to problems in which the contact area is a priori unknown, or in problems in which the bonded area is predefined and it is the onset of debonding that is of interest. The simplified boundary condition is shown to be very useful and simple to use in both cases, but particularly in the latter class of problems. In the case of one-dimensional or axisymmetric problems where one of the bodies is rigid, this representation is equivalent to the Moment-Discontinuity-Method (MDM) introduced by Pamp and Adams and Majidi and Adams. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.