Experimental study of ferritic stainless steel bolted T-stubs under monotonic loading

A comprehensive experimental study on the structural behaviour of stainless steel T-stubs in Grade EN 1.4003 ferritic stainless steel and employing A4–80 stainless steel bolts is reported in this paper. A total of 17 ferritic stainless steel T-stubs of various geometric configurations including both single and double bolt rows were tested under monotonic tension. The focus of the tests was on T-stubs failing predominantly in mode 1. Auxiliary tensile tests were performed on coupons extracted from the T-stub flanges in three directions thereby enabling the material anisotropy to be quantified. The ultimate resistance, plastic deformation capacity and failure mode of each T-stub were obtained and are reported herein. The obtained results are utilised to assess the accuracy of existing design rules, which, contrary to austenitic and duplex stainless steels, seem to offer a good prediction of the experimentally determined plastic resistance. Finally, the applicability of recently proposed predictive equations accounting for membrane actions in carbon steel T-stubs to ferritic stainless steel T-stubs has also been assessed.