Failure of bolt connection in fiber reinforced plastic component exposed to bending torque

Efficient testing of bolt connections is important in truck manufacturing industry to provide high quality vehicles within short lead time. This holds in particular if the vehicle components are produced in fiber reinforced plastic composite materials, because such components are often associated with extensive test programs to obtain a complete investigation of strength, durability and effect of environmental conditions. This paper presents an experimental test setup that examines the failure strength of bolt connections exposed to bending torque. A pultruded glass fiber reinforced beam attached with steel bolts is studied in detail. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the methodology, and a computational model is used to analyze the experiment and generalize the results. The conclusion is that the experiment can be computationally modeled, so that important material model parameters can be identified. Only failure strength is considered in this work, however the test setup is developed to also allow fatigue testing with repetitive loading.