At present, few scholars have studied the effect of surface roughness on assembly stiffness. The influence of the joint surface stiffness on the overall stiffness is neglected. In this paper, a new method for calculating the stiffness of bolted joints is presented. The effect of joint surface stiffness on the overall stiffness is considered. Firstly, the relationship between load and displacement between cylinder and cylinder (including the joint surface with certain roughness) is studied, and the stiffness characteristic expression of the joint surface is obtained; the results are compared with the traditional stiffness calculation theory, and then, the influence of bolt connection surface on bolt connection is studied and compared with the stiffness calculation results of traditional bolt connection. The results show that the theoretical model presented in this paper is more practical.

In order to design a reasonable thread connection structure, it is necessary to understand the axial force distribution of threaded connections. For the application of bolted connection in mechanical design, it is necessary to estimate the stiffness of threaded connections. A calculation model for the distribution of axial force and stiffness considering the friction factor of the threaded connection is established in this paper. The method regards the thread as a tapered cantilever beam. Under the action of the thread axial force, in the consideration of friction, the two cantilever beams interact and the beam will be deformed, these deformations include bending deformation, shear deformation, inclination deformation of cantilever beam root, shear deformation of cantilever beam root, radial expansion deformation and radial shrinkage deformation, etc.; calculate each deformation of the thread, respectively, and sum them, that is, the total deformation of the thread. In this paper, on the one hand, the threaded connection stiffness was measured by experiments; on the other hand, the finite element models were established to calculate the thread stiffness; the calculation results of the method of this paper, the test results, and the finite element analysis (FEA) results were compared, respectively; the results were found to be in a reasonable range; therefore, the validity of the calculation of the method of this paper is verified.

The virtual material model is now widely applied for modeling the dynamical performance of assembled structures since it can effectively represent the complicated contact behavior of joint interfaces despite being relatively simple to create. In this study, a virtual material model is adopted for modeling the dominant physics of a bolted joint subject to a set of pretightening conditions. The unknown virtual material parameters are acquired by an inverse identification procedure that uses the surface response methodology. The greatest advantage of this approach is the ease with which it acquires the joint parameters without taking apart a built-up structure to do special measurements on each separated component. Intricate theoretical calculations can also be avoided when this method is used. This study addresses the responses of virtual material parameters under different pretightening considerations. Predictions based on the identified virtual material parameters are compared with the corresponding results obtained using the analytical method. The correlation between the two sets of results at all preload levels is promising, which indicates the successful identification of the virtual material parameters.

Although some scholars have established the calculation method of bolt head connection characteristics, the method contains fewer influence factors; the calculation accuracy is not high, and the general applicability is limited. Based on the Levenberg Marquardt optimization algorithms, a more accurate calculation model of bolt head connection stiffness is proposed in this paper. The model includes many parameters such as bolt head thickness, equivalent diameter, bolt diameter, thickness of connected parts, elastic modulus of bolt and elastic modulus of connected parts. Through the finite-element verification and comparison with the results of the Fears Alkatan method, the calculation results of the bolt head connection stiffness calculation model in this paper are effective and accurate, which provides a universal calculation model for calculating the bolt head connection stiffness of various parameters, and fills the shortage of inaccurate calculation of the current theoretical model of bolt head stiffness.INDEX TERMS bolt head, stiffness, finite element, connected parts.

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