Adhesive interfaces are suitable modelling tools to describe very thin elastic layers and the related occurring phenomena (such as damage, viscosity, friction, etc.), without using a volumetric description, which is often computationally prohibitive in a large-scale numerical simulation. A major drawback of these kinds of models is the identification of free parameters, because of the smallness of a direct observation scale. This paper proposes a numerical assessment of two model parameters, a damage energy threshold and a damage viscosity, of a hard interface model previously formulated by authors. The proposed assessment protocol uses macroscopic experimental data, available in the literature, on structural adhesives under standard characterization tests. The numerical results obtained give insights into the physical interpretation of these parameters.
Keywords: adhesive; analytical modelling; identification; imperfect interface; micro-cracking.