Modeling tangential friction based on contact pressure distribution for predicting dynamic responses of bolted joint structures

Subjected to dynamic excitations, bolted joint interfaces exhibit nonlinear characteristics that significantly affect the dynamic response of assembled structures. In this paper, a novel modeling method is developed to improve the prediction accuracy of the tangential contact behavior of bolted joint interfaces. This method is based on the framework of the Iwan model and builds the relationship between the Iwan density function and the distribution of the contact pressure. It is the first time to give an explicit physical significance of the Iwan density function. The effectiveness of the proposed model is validated well by comparing with published experiments. Then the proposed model is integrated into a numerical model of a bolted joint structure and combined with the alternating frequency/time method to study its applicability in dynamics analysis. The model is fully compatible with the current state-of-the-art numerical analysis tools. The results show that the simulated interface responses are in good agreement with the experiment.