Fracture modelling of A4–80 stainless steel bolts in different bolted connection components

To accurately model the structural collapse of the stainless steel beam to column connections under extreme loading situation, it is necessary to incorporate a reliable fracture model which replicates the observed structural response of the components. Since bolt fracture quite often governs the ultimate strength and deformation capacity of bolted connections which can also lead to failure of overall joint, it is therefore important to consider the fracture in the numerical analysis of such connections. Upon recent studies on characterisation of fracture properties of austenitic stainless steel bolts, incorporation of the bolt fracture into the numerical analysis of different stainless steel components has been studied in this study. To show the reliability and validity of recently proposed fracture model for stainless steel bolts, an advanced numerical model has been developed herein to simulate the structural behaviour of different components in stainless steel bolted connections such as threaded and unthreaded bolts, bolted T-stubs and moment resisting frame. The developed numerical model has been validated against the existing experimental data and comprehensively reported. The experimental response of all considered components which ultimately failed by bolt fracture under pure tension, were all accurately predicted by the developed fracture modelling approach.