Non-uniform virtual material modeling on contact interface of assembly structure with bolted joints

Accurate modeling of contact interface in bolted joints is crucial in predicting the dynamic behavior for bolted assemblies under external load. This paper presents a contact pressure distribution based non-uniform virtual material method to describe the joint interface of assembly structure, which is connected by sparsely distributed multi-bolts. Firstly, the contact pressure distribution of bolted joints is obtained by the nonlinear static analysis in the finite element software ANSYS. The contact surface around bolt hole is divided into several sub-layers, and contact pressure in each sub-layer is thought to be evenly. Then, considering multi-asperity contact at the micro perspective, the relationship between contact pressure and interfacial virtual material parameters for each sub-layer is established by using the fractal contact theory. Finally, an experimental platform for the dynamic characteristics testing of a beam lap structure with double-bolted joint is constructed to validate the efficiency of proposed method. It is found that the theoretical results are in good agreement with experimental results by impact response in both time- and frequency-domain, and the relative errors of the first four natural frequencies are less than 1%. Furthermore, the presented model is used to examine the effect of rough contact surface on dynamic characteristics of bolted joint.