EXPERIMENTAL AND FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS ON THE ULTIMATE BEARING CAPACITY OF HOLLOW SPHERICAL JOINTS WITH RIBBED STIFFENER

Four groups(12 in total) of welded hollow spherical joints with ribbed stiffener were tested under uniaxial loads in this paper.With the adoption of elasto-plastic model and consideration of geometric and material nonlinearity,the whole loading process of the specimens was simulated with the help of ABAQUS FEM software.Through combining the test data and computing results,two recommendations used to quantitatively determinate the ultimate bearing capacity of a tested spherical joint were proposed.The relationships between bearing capacity and various influence factors,which include the thickness and diameter of hollow sphere,the diameter of steel tube and the multi-directional axial force,were analyzed and illustrated at the end of this paper.