Rapid method for low cycle fatigue properties: thickness effect on the fatigue crack initiation life of welded joints.

Welded assemblies are commonly used in the shipbuilding industry. Because of the combination of stress concentration and cyclic loading, welded joints could be a critical area for fatigue damage. Thus, knowing stress and strain histories at the critical points of the structure is necessary, particularly when a confined plasticity occurs, to determine the fatigue life of welded assemblies. To avoid time-consuming nonlinear finite element analyses (FEA), simplified estimation methods of the elastic-plastic strain/stress can be used. In a previous work, an approach to estimate stress state at critical points was developed and employed in the case of double-notched specimens. The present paper focuses on welded joints in order to validate this strategy with the aim to estimate the fatigue crack initiation life of T-joints. To go further, a parametric approach has been adopted to take into account the local geometries of welded joints and to determine the constraint operator without any FEA. The results predicted by this approach are compared with experimental fatigue results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]