My last couple of projects at JPL have involved bonded composite joints and I’ve learned a few things about the topic:

1. Every design requires an engineering development effort. Composites and bonded joints are highly workmanship dependent, hard to analyze, and will likely break in the most unique way possible.

2. A picture is worth a thousand words, and good test data is worth a million nodes in your finite element model.

3. Select your vendor carefully, and make sure to ask if you can see a picture of something similar they’ve done in the past. That would have saved me a lot of time and hassle

4. Composite prepreg (the stuff you make things like carbon fiber plates out of) is characterized as resin content percent by weight. A cured panel is specified as fiber percent by volume. Don’t screw that up.