Experimental and constitutive investigation on tangential sliding behavior of bolted joints with high preload

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to investigate the tangential sliding behavior of bolted joints with high bolt preload. Experiments with 12.4 kN preload show that wearing effect is not obvious during the micro-slip stage while pronounced during the macro-slip stage. A phenomenon of decreasing macro-slip force is observed. A novel constitutive model for wearing effect is proposed and verified against experiments. A discretization strategy of evenly-divided stiffness for the model is provided and applied in FEM simulation. Numerical results show that element numbers have no obvious effect on the calculating accuracy of the backbone curve during micro-slip stage. For macro-slip stage, more elements provide higher accuracy. Compared with previous constitutive models, the proposed one can accurately describe the decreasing macro-slip force under different conditions.