DUCTILITY REQUIREMENTS IN SHEAR BOLTED CONNECTIONS

In most of the design codes, very few recommendations exist to ensure the ductile behaviour of connections with non preloaded bolts under shear loading. The engineers are therefore used to consider steel as a “good” material with sufficient ductility, so allowing generally to reach at ultimate state a uniform distribution of the internal forces consecutive to a plastic redistribution amongst the bolt rows. But in reality this requires a sufficient deformation capacity from the constitutive plates in bearing and connectors in shear. In the present paper, all these aspects are discussed and ductility requirements allowing to reach uniform distributions of internal forces in shear connections are proposed. These investigations have to be seen as a preliminary step on the way to the proposal of more general ductility criteria covering other important aspects as high strength steels, tolerances of fabrication, oversized and slotted holes, …