Modeling on displacement response and damage mechanism of contact interface during installation for composites sleeved interference joint

Interference-fit has remarkable advantages in improving the load-bearing performance of the structure, but the interface damage caused by interference installation becomes a weakness in the reliable application of composite joints. Therefore, a reliable and effective physically-based numerical model to reveal the displacement response and damage mechanism of contact interface during installation for composites sleeved interference joint was developed by combining the physically-based LaRC05 criterion and the energy-based linear softening law in this paper. The Partition Golden Section Search algorithm was employed to balance the accuracy of damage pre-diction and computational efficiency. The interference installation simulations with different geometric pa-rameters were carried out and validated by experiments. Results show that the larger the bolt-sleeve interference-fit percentage, the more severe the non-uniform plastic deformation of the sleeve in the installation. Increasing the sleeve thickness can improve the uniformity of radial displacement distribution of the sleeve and alleviate the interface damage, but it cannot eliminate the connection gap. Choosing the appropriate sleeved fastener with taper can effectively avoid the aforementioned gap, improving the uniformity of displacement distribution and even reducing the interface damage.