Residual stress and fatigue behavior of riveted lap joints with various riveting sequences, rivet patterns, and pitches

Abstract

The residual stress of multi-rivet structures is related with the riveting sequence, the rivet pattern, and the pitch due to the deformation interaction of different rivets. The stress amplitude of riveted structures subjected to the cyclic loads is affected by the residual stress, which increases the difficulty in the prediction of fatigue life. In this article, the riveting processes for single-row and triple-row riveted lap joints with various riveting sequences, rivet patterns, and pitches are studied numerically and experimentally. The residual stresses for both types of riveted structures are verified by the testing data. Significant difference appears in the residual stress field for riveted lap joints with various riveting sequences and rivet patterns. The decrease in the rivet pitch increases the compressive residual stress at the edge of the rivet hole. Furthermore, the fatigue life prediction model is developed for multi-rivet structures, in which the coupling effect of residual stress and cyclic load is considered. The fatigue experiments are conducted for riveted lap joints with various riveting sequences, rivet patterns, and pitches. The accuracies of the numerical results obtained from the Homan model and the developed model are compared with the experimental data. The proposed fatigue model shows better performance to predict fatigue life for multiple rivet structures.