Comparison of experimental study and finite element analysis of bolted flange connections

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Date

2015

Author

Yılmaz, Samet Emre

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Design and analysis of bolted flange connections is challenging because of the nonlinear nature of contact mechanics involved in the analysis of bolted flange connections. Aerospace industry requires faster design with least number of tests because testing is costly and time consuming. Bolted flange connections are subject to variety of load cases that includes thermal, centrifugal and contact loads and it is not practical to consider all of the load cases during tests. As a result, finite element method is considered to be the fastest and most reliable tool during the design and the analysis phases of the bolted flange connections. Finite element method takes contact and material nonlinearities into account and simulates the problems more realistically. However, high level of expertise is required during the analysis, because there are many contact parameters that should be chosen by the user and accuracy and convergence of the bolted flange connection solution are affected by these parameters. There are also linear tools to determine structural integrity of the bolted joints but these tools result in either conservative or non-conservative solutions. In the thesis, the effect of main contact parameters on the accuracy and solution time of the finite element analysis of the bolted flange connection is investigated. Main contact parameters that are considered are the contact stiffness factor, penetration tolerance factor the contact algorithm. Both elastic and plastic analyses are performed for a bolted flange connection for which experimental data is available in the literature. The results of finite element analysis for varying main contact parameters are compared with the experimental data of the bolted flange connection, and conclusions are inferred with regard to the effect of main contact parameters on the accuracy and computational time of the finite element analysis. Experiments are also performed for tensile loading of a bolted L-bracket, and strain gage and digital image correlation results are compared with the finite element analysis results of the bolted L-bracket. Results show that with the proper choice of the contact parameters, close agreement can be obtained between the experimental results and finite element analysis results of the bolted L-bracket.

Subject Keywords

Flanges., Contact mechanics., Finite element method., Penetration mechanics.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12619257/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/24938

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

S. E. Yılmaz, “Comparison of experimental study and finite element analysis of bolted flange connections,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2015.