ON THE EFFECTS OF CIRCULAR BOLT PATTERNS ON THE ...

CHAPTER 3
3. EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION
3.1 Introduction
The details of the experimental study conducted in this research are presented in this chapter. A
description of the test specimens, test setup, testing procedure, and test results are provided for each
specimen. The initial investigation was conducted on three T-Stub connections to study the effect of the
bolt pattern configuration on the ductility, bolt force distribution, and overall performance of the
connection. The results obtained from T-Stubs test specimens were also used for FEM models
verification. Initially, the T-Stub with different bolt pattern configuration were loaded monotonically. The
details of this experimental study are elaborated in detail in Chapter-4. Also, the details of five
experimental studies conducted by Abolmaali et al. [64][65] are presented in this chapter. The
experimental results obtained from these experimental investigations are used to verify the results
obtained from the numerical analysis presented in Chapter-4.
3.2 T-Stub Testing Program
Due to similarity between the behavior of the T-Stubs under tension, and tension flange of the
extended end-plate connection, numerical T-Stub models were used in the first phase of this study to
create reasonable benchmarks for further investigations. Several bolt pattern configurations were
proposed and finite element models were developed and analyzed with various bolt size, plate thickness,
pitch sizes (Pf), and gage lengths (g). The scope of this phase of the study was to study the potential
performance enhancement of the T-Stubs due to various bolt pattern configuration. The compression of
the numerical results obtained from finite element analysis revealed that the circular bolt had the most
impact on the tensile capacity of the T-Stubs connections.
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