Integrated approach to specimen design for accurate tensile and compressive testing using FEA and experiments

Abstract The mechanical behavior of aerospace fasteners, including bolts, studs, and other parts that fall under that category, is an important factor in establishing the structural safety and performance of aircraft. This paper focuses on experimental study, which was conducted on dog-bone specimens of sub-sized Titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V (Grade 5) material, testing their tensile and compression failure characteristics by both experimentation and finite element analysis techniques. Specimens with different geometries, including flat, cylindrical, filleted, and chamfered shapes, are tested to observe their influence on the mechanical performance under tensile displacements ranging from 0 to 20 mm and compressive loads up to 100 kN. The study is to examine the uniformity in stress distribution and the necking phenomena of the four different shaped specimens using experimentation under the same loading conditions. The experimentation results are correlated with numerical analysis using the finite element method (FEM). Correlation results show that the cylindrical specimens with fillet give better stress-level absorbing in tensile testing as it has the capability to with stand a minimum of 200 MPa more than the other profiles, while a cylindrical shape is suitable for compression testing as it deforms 10% lesser than flat profile. In addition, this paper presents how the experimental and FEM approach can be effectively applied to investigate the tensile and compression behavior of sub-sized geometries.