I am an engineer and I am calculating the strength of an anchor bolt for a job that I am designing. I want to use plastic sleeves on many of the anchor bolts on my project, but I don’t know how these sleeves affect the pull out strength of the anchor bolts. Is there any information on the subject?
Portland Bolt is unaware of any information that addresses this question. Plastic sleeves seem to be a “gray area” due to the fact that no specifications cover them or design guides mention them. AISC Design Guide 1, 2nd Edition, Base Plate And Anchor Rod Design, Page 49, does address steel sleeves and has information on how to design a steel pipe sleeve, but does not directly mention plastic sleeves that cover only a part of the embedment of the anchor bolt. Perhaps the information in Design Guide 1 could be applied in some fashion to plastic sleeves, but this would be a decision for a structural engineer to make. To our knowledge plastic sleeves have no such design information published by governing bodies or made available from the manufacturers of the sleeves themselves. Despite this, plastic anchor sleeves are commonly used by large, reputable, and informed corporations and engineers for a wide variety of construction projects.
