Dr Christof Nagel
Senior Scientist, Fraunhofer IFAM
Dr. Christof Nagel is a Senior Scientist at Fraunhofer IFAM with over 20 years of experience in adhesive bonding technologies.
He specialises in durability, fatigue, and lifetime prediction of bonded joints in lightweight and composite structures.
He coordinates the strategic field “Circular and Safe Structures”, focusing on sustainable and industry-ready bonding solutions.
His work spans collaborative R&D projects in aerospace, transportation, and industrial sectors.
He is active in standardisation (CEN/CENELEC) and engineering qualification programmes (EAE).
Vitrimer Based Debondable Adhesives: Demonstration and Computational Analysis
With the latest advances in materials science, self-healing vitrimer adhesives with the ability to reform their polymer chain bonds with the application of external heating have emerged. These adhesives allow the manufacture of debond-on-demand and rebondon-demand joints. This study presents a novel simulation approach that combines phenomenological modeling with finite element models of adhesive joints. The goal is to model the weakening of polymer chain bonds within the adhesive due to heating and estimate the required heating time to reach optimal debonding of the joint. The proposed phenomenological model is fitted to experimental stress-relaxation curves for the adhesive at different temperatures and implemented into finite element models with a user subroutine. Round-butt joints with aluminium adherends were manufactured and debonded at different heating temperatures to validate the proposed model. The finite element simulation results were compared to the experimental stress-displacement curves, showing that the proposed model was able to accurately predict the stiffness reduction of the adhesive for the temperature range that led to optimal debonding with purely cohesive failure in the experiments.
Co-authors:
Antonios Tempelis, Vinicius Carrillo Beber, Uwe Specht, Florian Sayer, Leon Mishnaevsky Jr
Breakout Session XI – Research Advances in Adhesive Science & Processing – 17 September 2026 – 16:30 – 17:00 – Room Churchill – GF