Publication
In this article, the manufacturing and toughening effects on the material properties of epoxy adhesives used in wind tur-bine rotor blades are presented. Different adhesive materi-als are developed by combining SPABONDTM 820HTA (non-toughened) and SPABONDTM 840HTA (toughened) adhesives with the machine and manual mixing methods. Firstly, the manufacturing quality are compared between the two meth-ods, in terms of void percentage and void volume using micro-computed tomography. Dynamical Mechanical analy-sis, uniaxial tensile testing, V-notch shear testing and single-edge-notch beam testing are carried out to evaluate the man-ufacturing and toughening effects. In these experiments, the digital image correlation technique is exploited to obtain the displacement and strain data. Origin ProR((R)) and MATLAB R2021bR((R)) 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 pre-dict the thick adhesive joint behavior by finite element mod-eling.