Welded joints are widely employed in engineering field and they are
always the starting points of fatigue damage. Because of the unfavorable
material and geometry characters, as well as initial welding defects,
the fatigue damage evaluation of welded joints is an important and
troublesome issue for engineers. In this article, multiaxial fatigue
space theory proposed by the first author for smooth specimens is
extended for the fatigue damage assessment of welded joints, by adopting
nominal stress approach. The fatigue test data with different materials,
loading paths, and welded joints geometries are used to validate the
capability of this theory. The result indicates a strong parallelization
between predicted life and experimental life, with a favorable
prediction error and beneficial error distribution. It can be concluded
that multiaxial fatigue space theory is a useful method for fatigue
damage assessment of welded joints with the help of nominal stress
approach.
A comparative study on fatigue damage assessment of welded joints under uniaxial loading based on energy methods