Mon, 17 April, 2023
A new paper written by experts from TWI and investigating the fatigue life of welded joints has been published by the International Journal of Fatigue.
The open access paper, "Influence of the mean stress on the fatigue life of welded joints under variable amplitude loading," was written by TWI project leader Xu Liu alongside TWI consultant Yan Hui Zhang, TWI team leader Xing Sun, and Bin Wang of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Brunel University London.
The paper investigates how mean stress impacts the fatigue life of welded joints through an examination of three different plate thicknesses under variable amplitude (VA) loading.
The test results indicate that mean stress does affect the fatigue performance of these as-welded joints under VA loading, with this study also presenting experimental data on the residual stresses and fatigue endurance of the joints. The test results indicate that Miner's sum, D, at failure increases as the maximum stress in the loading reduces.
This paper shows that fatigue design codes may be unduly conservative in fatigue assessments, and new analytical models that consider both the mean stress and the VA loading sequence were developed to improve fatigue life prediction.
This is another example of how our experts use their knowledge and experience to continue progressing the in-depth understanding of welding, joining and allied processes, and you can see the paper in full, here.