Experimental Study On Tensile-shear Behavior Of Aluminum Alloy Welded Joints And Finite Element Analysis

As a connecting structure, aluminum alloy welded joints are widely used in advanced equipment. During their service, aluminum alloy welded joints may not only solely be subjected to tensile, compression, shear, bending or torsion loads, but two or more kind of loads simultaneously. The combination of tensile and shear loads is a common case. In this paper, an experimental and numerical study on tensile-shear behavior of aluminum alloy welded joints was conducted.The tensile and shear behavior of aluminum alloy welded joints was firstly tested following the corresponding standard experimental procedure. Both strain gauge measuring and digital image correlation method (DICM) were used to collect strain data in uniaxial tensile test. The results show that DICM can fully record strain history during test.Numerical analysis of the current V- notch tensile-shear joints specimen shows that this type specimen may fail to acquire the mechanical properties during test. As a result, a new U-notch butterfly specimen was proposed in this paper. Numerical simulation results show that the highest stress is located in the center of welding zone of U- notch specimen, which ensures the effectiveness of tensile- shear test.A tensile-shear test was then conducted on the proposed U- notch aluminum alloy welded joints specimen, which showed that all the tests were effective. Moreover, the U- notch specimen demonstrated a close mechanical behavior in sole tensile and shear test, comparing to the experimental data was obtained by the standard test. Therefore, the proposed U- notch aluminum alloy welded joints specimen is suitable to be used to obtain its mechanical properties subjected to tensile-shear load.The tensile-shear test of U- notch aluminum alloy welded joints showed that an increase in percentage of shear load can lead to a decrease in ultimate bearing capacity of the specimen. An improved elliptic equation was developed to estimate the ultimate bearing capacity of aluminum alloy welded joints subjected to tensile-shear load.