New studies on the effect of bearing loads in lugs with clearance fit pins

Abstract Pin joints are used very commonly in many engineering fields. In practice the sizes of the pins and the holes are not perfectly matched. This difference may be characterised by a mismatch parameter. Also intentional interference is introduced to improve fatigue life, or clearance is provided as in the case of hinges in lugs. In both of these cases the pin/plate interface (contact/separation) is a nonlinear function of the load. For illustration the pin is treated as rigid and the pin/hole interface as smooth. A finite element analysis with inverse formulation is carried out to study the stress distributions, and the results are concisely presented by defining suitable parameters. The results show some interesting features. The normalised maximum bearing stress on the hole boundary not only varies nonlinearly with the magnitude of the load parameter but the nonlinear law depends on the type of load (push or pull) on the pin.