A critique of the EUROCOMP simplified design method for bolted joints in long fibre reinforced polymer composite materials

摘要

Three shortcomings with the EUROCOMP simplified design method for bolted joints in composite materials are identified. They are: inadequate definition of materials, stress distributions that violate equilibrium and inadequate specification of the bolt/hole interface conditions. Pultruded GRP material properties are used in Finite Element (FE) analyses of stress distributions for six load cases which are central to the method. The stress distributions obtained from the analyses confirm that equilibrium is violated in some instances by the normalised stress curves given in [1]. Moreover, it is shown that for the two cases of bolt/hole contact, with and without clearance, it is not valid to use a single normalised stress curve for design, as stresses are dependent on the magnitude of the clearance and the applied boundary stress.