Effect of damaged circular flange-bolted connections on behaviour of tall towers, modelled by multilevel substructuring

摘要

The paper deals with non-linear analysis of a telecommunication tower with circular flange-bolted connections (CFBCs). They are composed of two flanges, welded to the structural tubes, and then connected together with pre-tensioned bolts. A rigorous FEM analysis is performed for finding the connection stiffness in two cases. One deals with all bolts undamaged and the second one with one or more bolts broken.