Special issue on Fatigue of Welded Connections
In light of the important role played by weldments in applications of practical interest, since about the middle of the last century researchers have made a big effort in order to provide structural engineers with accurate methods suitable for designing welded components against fatigue. In particular, the state of the art shows that such a problem has been systematically investigated not only to propose reliable fatigue life estimation techniques but also to evaluate the influence of different technological and metallurgical aspects on the overall fatigue strength of weldments.
Due to the importance of such a topic, a special symposium on ''Fatigue Assessment of Welded Structures" was organised in the ambit of the 6th International Conference on Fracture and Damage Mechanics, FDM 2007, which was held in Madeira, Portugal, from the 17th till the 19th of July 2007. The high level of the given talks suggested us releasing a special issue of International Journal of Fatigue to collect the extended and revised version of a number of papers selected from those presented at such a special symposium. Further, in order to give a more exhaustive overview of the new trends in this particular field of the structural integrity discipline, several researchers who gave a pivotal contribution to our understanding of the weldment response to fatigue were invited to submit a paper.
We do believe that the present special issue can be of interest not only to academic researchers working on the theoretical basis of such an important problem of practical interest, but also to industrial engineers interested in a view of the state of the art.