Fractional cyclic cohesive zone model for time-dependent fatigue behavior of soft adhesives under mode-II loading

•Fractional cyclic CZM is developed to analyze time-dependent fatigue of soft adhesive.•Nonlinear viscoelasticity and in-situ response per cycle is crucial to fatigue damage.•CZM is validated through both creep and fatigue tests of single-lap shear specimen.•Effects of cyclic period and stress amplitude on fatigue life are investigated.•As loading period grows, failure shifts from fatigue- to creep-dominating mechanism. Soft adhesives exhibit nonlinear viscoelastic behavior during cyclic loading, suggesting that their cycle-dependent fatigue behavior can be significantly affected by the time-dependent deformation behavior. Soft adhesives are frequently subject to various cyclic conditions in practical applications, presenting potential safety risks. This paper has proposed a fractional cyclic cohesive zone model (CZM) to characterize the time-dependent fatigue behavior of soft adhesives. To capture the nonlinear evolution of fatigue damage under asymmetric stress-controlled cyclic loading, a fatigue damage model that considers the contribution of in-situ stress/strain was incorporated into fractional-order viscoelastic model. The proposed CZM was validated through single-lap shear creep tests at various stress levels and fatigue tests at various stress amplitudes and loading periods. Furthermore, the impacts of stress ratio and peak stress level on fatigue failure under different loading periods were investigated using the proposed CZM. The results indicate that under a short loading period, the failure of the soft adhesives is primarily influenced by cycle-dependent fatigue damage, while under a long loading period, it is primarily affected by time-dependent creep deformation. Overall, this work offers a numerical strategy to describe the fatigue failure of nonlinear viscoelastic soft adhesives and to understand their time-dependent fatigue failure mechanism, with implications for product design and optimization.