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Fatigue crack shapes development of plate-to-plate welded joints

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Abstract

This paper presents crack shapes development of 3D surface semielliptical cracks which are always found at the weld toe of non-load-carrying cruciform welded joints. The alternating current potential drop technique has been used to measure the eight crack depths along the weld toe where probes are placed at 10-mm intervals. 3D crack shapes can be obtained at any particular cycle during the fatigue test. Subregion boundary element methods incorporating the transition and quarter-point elements along the crack front are used to validate the experimental stress intensity factors along the crack front. A method for evaluating the effective stress intensity factors is proposed. It is found that the numerical results generally agree with the experimental results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil & Structural Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, 639798, Singapore

    S. T. Lie (Associate Professor) & S. P. Chiew (Graduate Student)

  2. Department of Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua University, 100084, Beijing, P.R. China

    Z. Xiang (Graduate Student) & Z. Cen (Professor)

Authors
  1. S. T. Lie
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  2. S. P. Chiew
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  3. Z. Xiang
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  4. Z. Cen
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Lie, S.T., Chiew, S.P., Xiang, Z. et al. Fatigue crack shapes development of plate-to-plate welded joints. Experimental Mechanics 41, 114–121 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02323113

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02323113

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