ABSTRACT
For the repair work of a corroded bolted connection, common practice is to use temporary bents or a bypass member over the connection. The costs of these methods are quite high and the traffic needs be regulated. The present study explores a repair method that requires no bents, no bypass member and no traffic regulation. The method is to conduct repair in an incremental fashion: the repair work proceeds gradually, part by part. Its validity is investigated by FEA. For the best accuracy, a bolt is to be modelled by 3-D solid elements, but the computational cost is very high. The employment of connector elements is therefore tried and its effectiveness is confirmed by the comparison with the results of solid element analysis and experiment, using a small connection model. The proposed method is then applied to a 4×23 bolted connection. The validity is verified by FEA with connector elements.
