Hi Everyone. I am just starting out with bolted joints in SW and I am trying to figure out how to identify if my bolted joint separates (in other words, if the load applied to the joint exceeds the pretension in the bolt). I setup a simple test assembly with two small plates and one bolt. The bottom plate is fixed, there is a no penetration contact condition between the plates, and tension is applied to the face of the top plate. A preloaded bolt joint is defined between two center holes in the plates. I am applying 30,000 N of preload to the M10 bolt and the tension load is 15,000 N. Friction modeling is off. In the results, when I use 'list connector force' I see that the Axial Force in the bolt is 31,190 N - higher than the preload. This does not make sense because, theoretically, if the tension load is below the preload, the tension on the bolt should remain the same. This is because, as the load increases from zero, the compression in the joint should decrease and the bolt tension should remain the same, up until the point where the load is greater than the preload. Does anyone know why solidworks does not reflect the theoretical result? One workaround I could imagine using is to set the preload to zero and just check that the final reported axial force in the bolt does not exceed the pretension I actually plan to use, but I am worried that would change other aspects of the analysis in unforeseen ways.