Bolted joining technique is the dominant joining method for CFRP load-carrying structures in aircraft. However, the weak point of such structures are the areas located in the vicinity of the fastener holes, which are the areas of increased stress concentration. In addition, drilling the holes results in structural discontinuities due to cutting material fibers. Among all failure modes of composite bolted joint, bearing failure is one of the most common type of damage. This failure is caused by the local compressive stresses acting normal to the contact surface, that leads to delamination of material due to insufficient strength of matrix. Therefore, it is extremely important to optimize the design of composite bolted joints in order to enhance the entire composite structure. To increase the load-carrying capacity of the composite joint structural parts and protect the hole walls from damage, a method for installing titanium bushing with glue into the holes of composite plate is proposed. The paper presents the results of numerical analysis of the impact of stacking sequence on the distribution of contact stresses in a double-shear bolted joint of composite plate to steel cover plates. Using the finite element method and ANSYS Workbench 2019 R3 software, a three-dimensional finite element model of a double-shear bolted joint was created, which enables to analyze the impact of the stacking sequence on the distribution of contact stresses at the bolts to titanium bushings interface in the case of uniaxial tension of the middle composite plate at the level of tensile stresses in the gross section of 100 MPa. The obtained result explains the fundamental difference in the behavior of composite and metal materials: due to the change in the orientation and sequence stacking, the stiffness of the composite element of the joint changes, which affects the ovalization of the holes and the level of local deformations of the bushings, which in turn leads to a change in the maximum contact stresses and their concentration. By optimizing stacking sequence, it was possible to reduce the level of maximum contact stresses by 1.1 times. At the same time, the degree of unevenness of the distribution of contact stresses decreased by 1.21 times. The optimal stacking sequence was one in which 37.5% of the fibers oriented at an angle of 0°, 50% of the fibers oriented at angles of ±45°, and 12.5% of the fibers oriented at an angle of 90°
Read full abstract