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The automobile industry is seeing an increased need for the application of plastics and their derivatives in various forms such as fiber reinforced plastics, in the design and manufacture of various automotive structural components, to reduce weight, cost and improve fuel efficiency. A lot of effort is being directed at the development of structural plastics, to meet specific automotive requirements such as stiffness, safety, strength, durability and environmental standards and recyclability. Fiber reinforced plastics being viscoelastic in behavior, are susceptible to the rate of loading or the strain rate, especially at high temperature conditions. Bonded sections made up of fiber reinforced plastics therefore require the understanding of their mechanical behavior at different strain rates, such as low rate loading (to simulate quasi-static loading) and high strain rate loading (to simulate impact type loading).

With the increased motivation for high fuel efficiency, most automotive research and development efforts are being directed at reducing the weight of an automobile without sacrificing the performance related to safety, durability and NVH. Body structure is one of the viable components for weight reduction. Therefore, use of composites, in particular fiber reinforced plastics are seen as a viable alternative to metals to reduce body weight with the lowest penalty on performance and cost. One could expect future vehicles to be a combination of light weight metals and non metals involving a lot of adhesively bonded interfaces. Structural analysis of these bonded joints subjected to mechanical loads is essential. However, since fiber reinforced plastics are subject to temperature effects, an analysis of structure involving such adhesively bonded materials should account not only for mechanical loading effects but also for the thermal loading effects.