Fatigue of fillet welded A515 steel

✍ Scribed by W.Y. Shen; P. Clayton

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 599 KB
• Volume: 53
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0013-7944
• DOI: 10.1016/0013-7944(95)00160-3

✦ Synopsis

Abstraet--A study has been made of the fatigue behavior of fillet welded ASTM A515 steel. As-welded and stress-relieved skip fillet weld specimens were tested under pulsed tension and alternating cyclic load to determine stress-life and crack propagation behavior. Crack initiation and propagation features were determined from sectioned surfaces. All fatigue cracks were semi-elliptic and initiated from weld end toes. The length/depth ratio was approximately constant during propagation. There was no consistent effect of tensile residual stress on fatigue life under pulsed tension but there was a detrimental effect under alternating loads. An equivalent crack model has been proposed to quantify the stress concentration effect at the crack initiation site based on the application of the Paris equation. The test results show that the equivalent crack can give a reasonable prediction of the fatigue life of a welded structure and is a potentially convenient tool in fatigue design.