Increasingly designers are considering the use of fibre reinforced plastic (FRP) pultrudedcomponents for the superstructure of pedestrian and lightweight roadway bridges. While adhesive bondingis more appropriate than bolting for joining FRP components, bolting is still the preferred joint type. This isbecause of lack of experience with bonding, its requirement for high quality control, and the need forjoining or replacing components in the field. However, bolted joints in FRP can exhibit low connectionfailure loads for bolted FRP components in bearing, shear out, and tensile splitting. Also, load distributionin a row of bolts joining FRP components can be highly non-uniform. Since FRP has linear elasticbehaviour to failure, the bolted components do not permit load redistribution among bolts in a row, andpremature connection failure can occur with failure of a single bolt.This presentation discusses an experimental study into the load distribution in a row of three and four boltsused in double-lap FRP joints.
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