Experimental Study on Mechanic Behavior of Flange Joint for Steel Tube Under Axial Tension

The flange joint is an important connection in steel tube structures. In this paper, 11 groups of flange joint tests were conducted to investigate the influences of tube diameter, flange plate thickness, the distance from the bolt to the tube centroid, bolt numbers and material strength on the mechanical behavior. One of two failure modes in tests is that the excessive plastic deformation on the flange plate makes the flange plate lose the bearing capacity; the other is that the steel tube yield makes the joints fail. The results show that the calculating method for flange joint in Chinese design code is so safe that amplifying the calculating results of the code by 1.2 times would be closer to the bearing capacity of specimens. For a flange joint with different tube diameters, thickening the flange plate of thinner tube or thinning the flange plate of another tube are effective to ensure the deformations on both sides of the flange plates are equivalent. The ratio of the bearing capacity of the steel tube to that of flange plate should be greater than 1.7. And the thickness of the flange plate should be thicker than 14mm to reduce the deformation caused by cutting, drilling and welding during manufacturing.

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