ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, Tama, Japonya, 3 - 09 Kasım 2017
Bolted flange connections are one of the most commonly used joint types in aircraft structures. Typically, bolted flange connections are used in aircraft engines. The main duty of a bolted flange connection in an aircraft engine is to serve as the load transfer interface from one part of the engine to the other part of the engine. In aircraft structures, weight is a very critical parameter which has to be minimized while having the required margin of safety for the structural integrity. Therefore, optimum design of the bolted flange connection is crucial to minimize the weight. In the preliminary design stage of the bolted flange connection, many repetitive analyses have to be made in order to decide on the optimum design parameters of the bolted flange connection. Two main methods used for analyzing bolted flange connections are the hand calculations based on simplified approaches and finite element analysis (FEA). While hand calculations lack achieving optimum weight as they tend to give over safe results, finite element analysis is computationally expensive because of the non-linear feature of the problem due to contact definitions between the mating parts.