Boundary Control on Embedded Heaters for Composite Joining

This paper demonstrates the use of boundary control on embedded resistive heaters with the purpose of precision temperature control for curing high strength adhesives when joining composite adherends. This is particularly useful in the presence of heatsinks, where a uniform heating technique will lead to temperature variations in the bondline. The major contribution of this work is to reduce such temperature variations by using boundary control on the embedded heater. This technique is demonstrated experimentally for bonding a single-lap joint, and the temperature variation in the bond area was reduced from 20.3% to 2.7%.