ABSTRACT
The aim of the present work is to develop an efficient strategy for the parametric analysis of bolted joints used in the aerospace area. They are used for elastic, structural assemblies, under quasi-static loadings, with local nonlinearities such as unilateral contact with friction. Our approach is based on a decomposition of the assembly into substructures and interfaces. The problem on each substructure is solved by the finite element method and an iterative scheme based on the LATIN method is used for the global resolution. The strategy proposed consists in calculating response surfaces such that each point of a surface is associated with a design configuration. Each design configuration corresponds to a set of values of all the variable parameters (friction coefficients, prestress) that are introduced into the mechanical analysis. Here we propose, instead of carrying out a full computation for each point of the surface, to use the capability of the LATIN method to re-utilize the solution to a given problem (for one set of parameters) in order to solve similar problems (for the other sets of parameters).