Abstract
In this article, the manufacturing and toughening effects on the material properties of epoxy adhesives used in wind turbine rotor blades are presented. Different adhesive materials are developed by combining SPABOND™ 820HTA (non-toughened) and SPABOND™ 840HTA (toughened) adhesives with the machine and manual mixing methods. Firstly, the manufacturing quality are compared between the two methods, in terms of void percentage and void volume using micro-computed tomography. Dynamical Mechanical analysis, uniaxial tensile testing, V-notch shear testing and single-edge-notch beam testing are carried out to evaluate the manufacturing and toughening effects. In these experiments, the digital image correlation technique is exploited to obtain the displacement and strain data. Origin Pro(Ⓡ) and MATLAB R2021b(Ⓡ) are utilized for technical data analysis, plotting, smoothing, filtering, and averaging. The obtained data could be used to select the adhesive material based on the strength and stiffness requirements, develop failure criteria, and predict the thick adhesive joint behavior by finite element modeling.