Simulation of delamination in a bolted joint

An application of the multiscale domain decomposition method to joints in laminate. The scientific bottleneck in this work was the cost of solving the coarse-grid problem of the domain decomposition approach. We used the ideas developed by Dr. Gosselet and Prof. Rey [Gosselet and Rey 2003] on the acceleration of Krylov solvers to fasten the solution process.

Section of the deformed bolted joint when loaded in traction.

One of the practical lessons of this work was that the whole design process needs to be scalable on a parallel architecture. An efficient parallel solver is virtually useless if the pre and post-processing steps cannot handle large distributed data.

A nice video for the simulation of a smaller joint.

Simulations by Pierre Kerfriden