On the application of a critical plane approach to the life assessment of welded joints

In the present work, the Fatemi-Socie approach is adopted in order to analyze the fatigue endurance of welded joints under multiaxial loads. This critical plane criterion has already been successfully applied to plain or notched components, however, it is not spread in the assessment of welded joints, yet. This work is focused on the practical implementation issues related to this particular application, which has not been discussed in the literature. The described procedure is adopted for the assessment of one hundred experimental tests and some preliminary results are shown. The specimen under investigation is a pipe-to-plate fillet joint made out of structural steel (S355JR). The tests were performed under both uniaxial and multiaxial, i.e. combined in-phase and out-of-phase bending and torsion, load conditions with a constant amplitude at the laboratories of the University of Pisa, Italy