Best Practices for Modeling Bolted Joints: Calibrating the BARC System

The necessity of digital engineering solutions to design and validate components and systems has greatly increased in previous years. As the dependence on digital solutions increases, it is critical that all aspects of the system are validated with experimental testing to ensure the model’s structural dynamic response is representative of what it will experience in operation. Bolted joints often cause analysts a lot of grief because they are complex and unique to their application. The complex nature of bolted joints has resulted in many methods to represent bolted joints in finite element models. In this study, multiple bolt modeling approaches are applied to the BARC system and compared to experimental tests. The mode shapes of the BARC will be compared to the experimental mode shapes using the modal assurance criterion. It is shown that including the hardware in the model improves the MAC values and decreases the percent difference between the model and the test natural frequencies. The aim of this study is to present a comparison of bolted joint methods for the linear structural dynamics of the BARC system.