The drilled crack-arrest hole and the attaching splices by high strength bolts are often used in combination as retrofit for fatigue cracks in steel structures. In this case, in order to evaluate the remaining fatigue life, it is important to accurately estimate the strain at the crack-arrest hole. Non-linear FE analysis considered the friction contact was often applied for the strain estimation in previous researches. In this study, a linear analysis model with simplified meshing was newly introduced. Through static loading tests and parametric FE analyses, it was verified that the model can estimate the strain at the hole with practically sufficient accuracy.
