Over the past few years, we have developed an advanced tool to comprehensively and efficiently assess bolts, rivets and pins. As the saying goes ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, the need to develop such a tool came from our own experience of having to tackle numerous fasteners on a daily basis in the FE model subjected to myriad of loading scenarios.

Highlights from the latest version of our software are:

• It comes with an intuitive and user friendly GUI geared to minimize learning curve
• Element forces and moments are automatically extracted from FEA solver output formats such as F06 (Nastran) & DAT (Abaqus)
• Based on prying distance, bending moments are converted to equivalent axial, which is then added to the pure axial component to derive the tensile force
• Both metric and english unit systems are supported
• Contains an inbuilt library of standard SAE/ASTM/ISO bolts data (sizes, preload, strength capacities etc.). User can import custom data if needed
• Calculates FOS in tension, shear, combined tension/shear and slip for each element based on Shigley/AISC/GB methodologies
• Supports assessment of fasteners across multiple load cases simultaneously
• Optimized to handle large data as typical FE models can contain thousands of fasteners
• All the calculated data can be exported to an excel spreadsheet for custom post-processing. For example: Perform what-if scenarios by changing bolt size, grade etc.
• With data from coupon testing, this software has been extended to evaluate spot welds and seam welds as well