Abstract
A bolted joint is frequently used under thermal load in practical applications, such as internal combustion engines, pressure vessels, brake disks, etc. In order to accurately evaluate the thermal stresses thus produced, the effects of thermal contact resistance at the interface and the heat flow through small gaps, which exist around the objective bolted joint, must be taken into account. By incorporating the effects in terms of thermal contact coefficient and apparent thermal contact coefficient into a commercial engineering software, a numerical approach is proposed, which can elucidate how the bolt stress is varied with time under thermal load and how the heat flows around the bolted joints. It is shown that among various factors, thermal conductivity has dominant effects on the rate of heat flow and coefficient of linear expansion has dominant effects on the variations of bolt stress.
