FEA Analysis of a bolted assembly.

[Kman514]

I'm working on a 4 bolted assembly in ANSYS and modeling my fasteners using bushings with stiffness values. Thinking about this from a design/fit up perspective, one of the holes will be shear carrying and used for clocking the part. Does that mean I should assume the other 3 fasteners are nmot carrying any shear load during analysis? Conceptually as the part is strained and the clearance to the other fasteners is absorbed, they will start to carry shear. Is is best modeling practice to say all 4 fasteners carry shear immediately?

Thanks!

 

[FEA way]

In such case, if you don't want to model the connection using solid elements and contact, I think that it would be best to analyze the worst case scenario - only one shear carrying bolt.