Fatigue life assessment of welded joints considering crack initiation and propagation based on the hot spot stress concept

The fatigue process of welded joints was investigated using the hot spot stress concept and considering the fatigue crack initiation and propagation stages. The research carried out within the project resulted in the development of a new method for the determination of stress concentrations and stress distributions in weldments by using only the shell finite element stress data.; It was shown that the linear bending and membrane stresses obtained from the shell finite element analysis and the proposed GY2 modeling method could be used to generate sufficiently accurate stress distributions at welds in welded structures. Several specific welded joints were analyzed using the GY2 shell finite element stress analysis procedure. To validate the proposed method, stresses obtained from shell FE models were compared with the stress data obtained from 3D FE models of the same object. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...