Through bolts in concrete wall 1

Are the bolts in oversized/drilled holes or are they cast into the wall? Loaded in shear on both sides of the wall?

The first idea that springs to mind if cast-in or post-installed with some sort of adhesive/resin is to use the anchoring to concrete relations of ACI318. Another approach would be to assume that they are elements bearing against one side of the hole and check bearing (assumes that the bolts are stiff enough not to bend alot inside the hole - otherwise there would be concentrated/higher pressures at the edges and some bearing in the opposite direction to the applied shear in the center of the bolt).

This question comes up often here and, in a couple of decades of monitoring those threads, I've not once seen anybody identify an accepted design procedure for through bolted connections.

My typical approach is to replace any possible through bolted connections with adhesive anchors. I do that for two reasons:

1) As mentioned above, there simply do not seem to be accepted methods for designing through bolt connections. There are such methods for adhesive anchors, in spades.

2) My impression is that, were there an accepted design method for through bolted connections, the results would not be much better that generously deep adhesive anchor connections. Often, the failure modes associated with adhesive anchor solutions will engage nearly the same frustum that you'd be hoping to engage with a through bolted connection.

Don't get me wrong though: I'm not saying that through bolted connection don't work or are not endowed with an elegant structural logic. I simply prefer to stick to connection methods where established evaluation procedures exist. That, for the sake of connection reliability and, to a lesser extent, defensibly should something go wrong.

The whole reason that the ACI anchorage provisions exist is that it's become abundantly clear that first principle connection design by engineers often does not lead to safe connections. And that's unfortunate because it's fun to do first principle designing.

There was a recent article about tests done on masonry walls. The principles are similar. See link below.

The beef that I have with the hybrid masonry work is that, to my knowledge, it's always a situation where load is delivered in equal measure +/- to the parts of the connection on either side of the wall. I feel that is quite different to the mechanics of the usual through bolted connection in which load is delivered to one side of the connection alone and the job of the plate on the backside is really resistance to tensile pullout or shear pryout.

Curious to know if anybody has tried adapting the general dowel equations from AWC TR 12 to assess these connections. We have dowel bearing strengths for steel and concrete, and I’m sure with some research and judgement we could come up with something for masonry. Any thoughts?