Experimental and numerical investigation of fretting fatigue behavior in bolted joints

Bolted joints may suffer from fretting damage which can significantly decrease fatigue life. A testing arrangement was developed to study the effect of different operating and design parameters of a single bolted joint on fretting fatigue life. Fretting fatigue stress-life (S-N) tests were conducted to investigate in particular the effect of bolt preload and cyclic bulk loading on fatigue life. Fretting fatigue life decreased when increasing the preload and also when increasing the bulk stress. The Digital Image Correlation method was applied to measure tangential displacements close to the contact. A corresponding finite element model of the test setup was used to analyze contact variables in greater detail. The numerical results corresponded well to the experimental results.