Design Parameters Effect on Load Distribution Around the Hole in Mechanically Fastened Pinned Connections

The pinned connection is a principal joining element in many structures. In this article, we present two-dimensional stress analyses for isotropic plate with a pinned circular hole. A study of the pin and the plate material dissimilarity was done by Iyer [6] but still different aspects of the problem are remained to be mentioned. In this work different issues of mechanical engineering interests such as stress distribution in contact area and the magnitude and location of maximum contact pressure and tangential stress are computed with the aid of commercial software ABAQUS 6.6-1 finite element code [7]. In order to have a good evaluation of the stress distribution around the hole, design factors such as plate width to hole diameter ratio (w/d), edge distance to hole diameter ratio (e/d), clearance at the connection area and the contact friction coefficient (μ) were systematically varied during analyses from 2 to 5, 3 to 6, 5% to 25% and 0 to 0.5 respectively. A Coulomb-type friction model is used to simulate the frictional contact at the pin-plate interface. The results obtained in this paper are compared to those available from the paper published by Iyer [6]. Based on the results, it is observed that higher friction at contact interface makes the joints more safe by reducing the peak contact pressure; the same is concluded by reducing the plate width.