Together with Prof. dr. ir. Johan Maljaars of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven we participated in the research project ‘The resistance of an aluminium self-tapping screw groove connection’.
The connection consists of an extruded aluminium profile with a groove in which a screw can be secured, that connects the profile to an aluminium plate (Macillo, 2013). The screw is driven into the groove and can be placed anywhere along the length of the groove. Additionally, a plate with threaded holes can be introduced to define the screw positioning. There are three ways in which the connection can be loaded. However, only research into the pull-out strength and shear perpendicular to the groove have been investigated to date. Design equations for the resistance of these loading types are included in prEN 1999-1-1.
This leads to the following research question: What is the parallel shear resistance of the connection consisting of an aluminium extruded profile of type EN AW 6082 T6 and a self-tapping screw in its groove?
Janneke Heuvelman and Erwin Webers conducted the lab tests for us and we are very satisfied with the results.
