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The impact of local geometry on the fatigue life of a welded structural detail
Author(s) -
Skoglund Oskar,
Leander John
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
ce/papers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2509-7075
DOI - 10.1002/cepa.1114
Subject(s) - welding , structural engineering , stress (linguistics) , eurocode , fatigue limit , radius , stress concentration , engineering , materials science , geometry , finite element method , mathematics , computer science , mechanical engineering , computer security , philosophy , linguistics
Fatigue often limits the capacity of welded steel bridges, and thus often governs the amount of steel required. The fatigue life is, to a large extent, governed by stress concentrations and the magnitude is controlled by local as well as global geometry; by improving the local geometry the stress raising effects can be lowered and by increasing the global dimensions the nominal stress can be reduced. The fatigue assessment format presented in the Eurocode gives little or no room for the designer to control the local geometry of the structural detail, and is often left with increasing the overall dimensions in order to improve the fatigue life of the structure. This paper aims at investigating the possible impact on the fatigue life of welded steel structures by different weld geometries. In this paper a vertical stiffener will be studied by fracture mechanics. The study showed that significant improvements in fatigue life can be made by small changes to the weld geometry and the most pronounced effect was by changing the weld toe radius, and for the case studied at least one higher detail category could be assigned to the vertical stiffener.