Using COMSOL to Support a Cost-Effective, Non-Destructive Evaluation Approach for Predicting Bolt Failure in Highway Bridges
The development of a quantitative nondestructive evaluation method, as an alternative to visual inspection, for inspecting pre-tensioned bolts in fracture critical bridges is presented. In order to understand the ultrasonic behavior of a wide variety of bolt geometries used in bridges, numerical models of nine different bolt geometries were developed.
The numerical models included the acoustoelastic behavior of the tensioned bolts using hyperelastic the Murnaghan material model, which represents the nonlinear relationship between stress and wave velocity. Additionally, two bolt geometries were experimentally tested using a longitudinal perturbation generated by a piezoelectric actuator, and propagating elastic waves were recorded using another piezoelectric sensor.
Download
- elyea_paper.pdf - 0.38MB