Effect of welding seam spacing and relative bar wall thickness of bus framework on joint’s local mechanical property

Now the researches concerning integral bus mainly focused on design and analysis of overall mechanical property of bus body, and paid little attention to characteristic of local structures, such as joint, plug welding hole, and bolt connection point, etc. So there is much blindness on the design of local connecting structure. Since integral bus body structure cancels large section longitudinal beam, and uses framework made by welding small section bars together as principal part to bear the whole load when the vehicle works, there are many joints receiving high load in the body structure, and local stress concentration can not be avoided. Under such circumstances, by adopting beam-shell mixed model based on super element technique, and selecting a joint commonly used by bus sidewall, the rule of the effect of bar joint’s welding seam spacing on joint’s local mechanical property is investigated in this paper, and the investigating results show that joints have minimum stress concentration with welding seam spacing of 8 mm. To learn whether the above rule is affected by relative bar wall thickness, many groups of bars with different relative bar wall thicknesses are studied experimentally, and the experimental results show that the joints local stress levels vary with different relative bar wall thicknesses, but the rule of the effect of bar joint’s welding seam spacing on joint’s local stress level remains the same. The research is significant for local structure design of bus joint in the future.