One of major considerations in the design of a structure made of composite materials is the bolted joint since a hole induces high stress concentration near the joint area. Furthermore, the stress distributions and the failure modes of the bolted joint of a composite structure are very complicated and dissimilar to metal joint because of the anisotropy of composite materials.
In this study, stress analysis was performed for the bolted joint of a composite cylinder under in-plane and out-of-plane loading condition by internal pressure. The finite element program based on the first order shear deformation shell theory was developed to study this problem. The analysis was performed to evaluate the effect of the stacking angle of a laminated composite cylinder and the number of bolts or distance between holes, which largely affect the stress distributions around hole of composite cylinder. To investigate the effect of stacking angle, the $[(90)_3/\pm{\alpha}/(0)_2]$ laminated cylinder was selected and calculated for various $\alpha$ values. The effect of the number of bolts was investigated for the $[(90)_3/\pm{45}/(0)_2]$ laminated cylinder with various cases. The stacking angle which shows relatively low stress concentrations on the hole boundary was obtained. The number of bolts that releases the stress concentrations around the joint area was presented.
