| Summary: | Thin metal sheets are widely used in the automotive industry; a large number of structures such as body in white (BIW), door, boot and bonnet are made from a combination of thin metal sheets of difference sizes. They are joined together by various types of joints such as spot welds, bolts and rivets. The dynamic behaviour of assembled structures can be significantly affected by these joints due to the complexity of their behaviour such as mating areas, clamping force and surface contact which are very difficult to model. In this paper, simple and reliable procedures for modelling bolted joints are presented and discussed. The procedures include using the connector elements of CFAST in MSC NASTRAN and initial stress ratio to represent the local effect of the bolted joints. The FE results are compared with the experimental results and the model updating method is used to improve the finite element models to reduce the discrepancies between the numerical and experimental results of natural frequencies of the structure. Optimisation code NASTRAN SOL 200 is used in updating the FE models.
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