The influence of bending on stress fields and fatigue strength of cruciform welds

Summary

This paper deals with stress fields in the vicinity of weld toes of cruciform non‐load carrying fillet welds.

An approach recently formulated for welded joints under remote tensile loading is extended to pure bending as well as to bending and shear conditions. The approach is based on two notch stress intensity factors that independently quantify Mode I and Mode II stress distributions.

The new method provides an analytical framework to a stress field criterion, already proposed by Atzori some years ago and more recently by Pluvinage and Verreman, to determine the fatigue strength of a welded joint.