Press together cold pressure welded joints made with Trib-Tools™ allow beams, structures and reinforcements to be assembled on site

APPLICATION NOTE: 8.

Light-weight beams assembled with Trib-Joints offer maximum strength-to-weight ratio and are easily assembled on site. They exploit a unique load sharing property of Trib-Joints which reduces the likelihood of individual struts becoming overloaded. This ensures optimum performance in applications ranging from decorative stainless or aluminium lighting gantries to high strength parts made in heavy gauge steel for say articulated lorry trailer chassis members or load bearing structural beams in bridges or buildings.

Trib joints are made with Trib-Tools,  these mildly abrade and clean the surface as they release trace amounts of cold welding agent that becomes absorbed into the oxide. This creates very high friction between rubbing pairs of surfaces on interfering metal parts as one is forced into another. 

In the illustration below wrapped, spun or turned bungs are forced into each end of spacer tubes set between two "U" channels. Twisted tensile cross braces are trapped between the channels and tubes. The cross tubes need to have the  weld bead removed from inside the tube -if the tube is of welded construction.

 Conventionally built up beams are made by fusion welding with cross brace joints in tension, which are vulnerable to fatigue. Fusion welds modify metallurgical structure, thus they are usually oversized for safety. Problems are worse in beams using welded lightweight tubular components where cooling cracks or thinned wall sections near the critical high stress junction create many engineering uncertainties. But a tubular column withstands the maximum Euler (buckling) load, an advantage utilised to the maximum in the beam shown since the friction joints can yield without any loss of strength. Thus subtle adjustment may occur between individual joints as the beam is first loaded to optimise loads within the beam.

In its simplest form a beam may be assembled be tapping the bungs into the cross tubes with a mallet or by using hydraulic clamps for large joints. The use of Trib Joints in tubular structures are discussed further in Application Notes 1 and 3  and is discussed in the Questions and Answer dialog.

for more information email: info8@tribtech.com

The TribTech name derives from "tribos" - Greek for 'rubbing'. 'TribTech' is a trade name used by Ball Burnishing Machine Tools Ltd. of 12 Brookmans Av. Hatfield, Herts. AL9 7QJ. United Kingdom;  Company Reg. No. 1408807, VAT Reg. No. 421 6210 04; a knowledge based company that develops, patents and licenses technology. All rights reserved by Ball Burnishing Machine Tools Ltd. Last modified: May 01, 2008 copyright © 1999/2008. The information and data provided herein should be considered generally representative for the tools and technologies described. In all cases users should carefully evaluate the tools and technologies to determine their suitability for a particular purpose.