Metal load transfer

Net-tension failures can be avoided or delayed by increased joint flexibility to spread the load transfer over several lines of bolts. Composite materials are generally more brittle than conventional metals, so loads are not easily redistributed around a stress concentration such as a bolt hole. Simultaneously, shear-lag effects caused by discontinuous fibers lead to difficult design problems around bolt holes. A possible solution is to put a relatively ductile composite material such as S-glass-epoxy in a strip of several times the bolt diameter in line with the bolt rows. This approach is called the softening-strip concept, and was addressed in Section 6.4. 

Figure 6.18. Changes of the annual transfer fluxes (from one day to one year) among solid-phase components with metal loading levels in Israeli soils. Soils received metal nitrates and were incubated in the saturated-paste (SP) and field capacity (FC) moisture regimes...

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