Due to the insufficient connection efficiency of the bolted connection of pultruded composites, a novel composite connection technique called hybrid bolt-tooth connection was proposed. The paper presents a series of experiments studying the bearing capacity and the failure mode of the hybrid bolt-tooth connection by comparing with the pure bolted connection. Furthermore, the influences of the depth, the length and the number of the teeth on the connector’s failure mode and bearing capacity were studied. The results indicate that compared with the pure bolted connection, the hybrid bolt-tooth connection has a higher connection efficiency thanks to the load sharing of the teeth. The number, the depth and the length of the teeth exhibit a significant influence on the bearing capacity and failure modes. With the increase of the number and the length of the teeth, the bearing capacity is improved effectively; the bearing capacity of the connection with shallow teeth is significantly higher than that with deep teeth. Therefore, the hybrid bolt-tooth connection is an effective jointing method and has a good application prospect.
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