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The 21st century brought new and complex technological challenges, which need to be solved. Of primary importance is the global energy transition that pushes forward the research and innovation in order to achieve the goal of replacing the existing non-renewable energy sources with new renewable and efficient ones, with positive effects on the world climate. In many countries worldwide mid- and long-term goals have been set out in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. Germany, among others, intends to reduce the emissions by 80 to 95% within 2050, compared with 1990 levels. The achievement of this goal is aimed to be realized by the development of new and more efficient energy sources, but also by substantial investments in electromobility (the goal is to bring one million electrically driven vehicles onto German streets by 2020).
Another important challenge came into play following the global financial crisis, which pushed many industries to reduce their operational and maintenance costs. In particular, the life-cycle management of a component has become of primary importance. In some cases it has been shown that the underestimation or the lack of awareness in ageing of plants led to incidents due to the loss of technical integrity. Other studies demonstrated that the component life of many of the long-life components could be extended up to 50% without compromising safety.
The third, not less important, challenge is driven by the development of new technologies and materials. The trends show a large investment in additive manufactured metal components and new metallic materials which have to assure longer in-service life, lightweighting and efficient recycling.
This works aims at addressing part of these problems by proposing a fracture mechanics-based analytical procedure for the determination of the fatigue lives of engineering components and particularly of welded joints. In fact, an analytical tool, which is able to simulate the main failure mechanisms of weldments under fatigue loading, brings many advantages: i) drastic reduction of long and expensive experimental tests; ii) optimization of the geometry and production processes (possible weight reduction); iii) better estimate of the safety margins used in the design of the components (life extension without safety issues).
The results show that the model can fairly well predict the lives of the welded joints investigated experimentally, irrespective of the geometry and loading conditions.
The work aims at addressing the modelling and implementation of criteria for multiple crack propagation, including interaction and coalescence, for a more reliable fracture mechanics-based prediction of stress-life curves for weldments.
A large experimental work is presented in which micro-cracks have been made visible by heat-tinting at successive stages of fatigue life of the welded specimens. Here the correlation between the number of initiation sites and the applied stress level has been also investigated.
The criteria have been implemented in in-house software, which allows multiple fatigue crack propagation, and validated against selected experimental tests. The results have shown that the modelling of multiple crack propagation and interaction is crucial for the prediction of the fatigue strength of weldments, both in finite and infinite life regime.
The paper provides an overview on the results of a German cluster project on the use of fracture mechanics to the determination of the fatigue strength of weldments with fatigue cracks originating at the weld toes. The approach includes (a) a concept for short crack propagation for which the common K concept is not applicable and the crack closure effects are still being gradually build-up, (b) a method for determining fatigue life relevant initial crack sizes as they are needed in any fracture mechanics analysis and (c) multiple cracking and crack coalescence at load levels higher than the endurance limit. The analyses are stochastically performed. Both, the endurance limit as defined for 107 loading cycles and the finite life branch of the S-N curve are determined.
Besides a brief introduction into the approach, a wide range of validation examples is presented. These comprise different weldment types (butt welds, cross joints and longitudinal stiffened plates), two steels of quite different strengths, different weld geometries due to different welding techniques (TIG, MAG), as-welded and stress relieved welds and different stress ratios varying from R = -1 to R = 0.5.
IBESS Methology for the fracture mechanics-based determination of the fatigue strength of weldments
(2018)
The presentation provides a brief overview on the results of a German cluster project on the use of fracture mechanics to the determination of the fatigue strength of weldments with fatigue cracks originating at the weld toes. The approach includes (a) a concept for short crack propagation for which the common K concept is not applicable and the crack closure effects are still being gradually build-up, (b) a method for determining fatigue life relevant initial crack sizes as they are needed in any fracture mechanics analysis and (c) multiple cracking and crack coalescence at load levels higher than the endurance limit. The analyses are stochastically performed. Both, the endurance limit as defined for 107 loading cycles and the finite life branch of the S-N curve are determined.
The fatigue assessment of welded joints requires several input data, which can be subdivided into three categories: geometry, material and loading. The number of input data depends essentially on the complexity of the models employed and on the level of accuracy of the analysis. It is common practice to use safety factors in design to account for the scatter of the input parameters. Nevertheless, overly-conservative factors lead often to unrealistic estimations of fatigue life. This work presents a fracture mechanics-based model for the structural integrity assessment of welded joints under constant amplitude fatigue loading, in which the local geometry at the weld toe and the fatigue crack growth properties are considered statistically distributed. The approach is validated against a large number of experimental data.