Analysis of steel bolted connections by means of a nonsmooth optimization procedure

A nonsmooth optimization procedure is herein proposed for the investigation of the bearing resistance of steel bolted connections. Taking into account the presence of nonlinear effects such as e.g. plasticity and interface interaction, and describing the resistance in bearing strength by means of a nonmonotone multi-valued reaction-displacement law obtained by experimental testing, the problem is formulated as a hemivariational inequality one. The latter is equivalent to a substationarity problem of the potential energy of the connection under investigation. This problem can be effectively treated numerically by applying an appropriately chosen nonconvex, nonsmooth optimization algorithm and in particular, the NSOLIB optimization algorithm based on the proximal bundle method has been applied. Two numerical examples whose results are compared to experimental testing results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.