A lot of effort is put to achieve bolt preload uniformity during the assembly process of offshore bolted joint connections resulting in potentially high economic costs and project delays. The complexity of this operation is due to the effect of the elastic interaction between the different joint elements which causes load variations of adjacent bolts whenever a bolt is tightened. As a consequence, it is difficult to achieve a uniform target load in the bolts.
In order to avoid this phenomenon, tightening sequences of a large number of passes are usually carried out until a uniform target load is achieved. This solution is neither practical nor efficient when treating hundreds or even thousands of bolted joints due to the large assembly time needed. Several methods were developed to study the effect of the elastic interaction and minimize the assembly time. These methods usually predict the loss of load of every bolt during the tightening sequence, and thus calculate the tightening loads that will provide a uniform final load at the end of the sequence. As a result, an optimized tightening sequence is achieved, which provides a uniform final load distribution in only one or two tightening passes. However, several complex and costly analyses are previously necessary for such purpose.
Based on these traditional methods, this paper presents a new and more efficient optimization methodology to achieve assembly bolt load uniformity. The method is based on the use of superelement technique and is capable of producing similar results with computational costs reduced by 30 times as compared to the more conventional Finite Element (FE) modeling. The results were satisfactorily validated with the latter as well as with tests conducted on a NPS 4 class 900 bolted joint.
