Parametric assessment of stress concentration factors for end-to-end joints with rotated SHSs

Abstract

End-to-end joining of rotated square hollow sections (SHSs) with fillet welded intermediate plates is a novel welded tubular joint that could be well suited for truss chords irregularly crossed in two directions. This paper presents an experiment based finite element (FE) modelling for developing stress concentration factor (SCF) analytical parametric formulae of fully and partially connected cases to fill a gap in the literature limited to SHS-to-SHS joints or T Joints. Typical hot spot stress distributions for the fully connected and partially connected end-to-end joints were revealed from experimental measurement. ANSYS parametric design language was employed by introducing three nonlinear geometric parameters (λ, θm and 2γ) related to the SHS chord and the intermediate plate as main controlling variables, and the novel configurations of crown and saddle areas were accurately simulated. The accuracy of constructed FE models has been validated by comparing with experimental data of six test joints with the variation of θm. The influences of three key geometric parameters and two joint configurations on the SCFs were subsequently examined through a comprehensive parametric study including 400 models. Thereafter, a series of analytical parametric formulae for the prediction of maximum SCFs of the crown and saddle areas of the joints were developed through a multivariate regression analysis and demonstrated to be in good agreement with numerical results.