Variation of Weld Profiles and Their Influence on Fatigue Strength

Abstract

The determination of fatigue life of mechanical parts such as welded joints during service which subjected to high stresses and cyclic loading is extremely important. In order to investigate life span of mechanical parts a finite element analysis is used. In this paper, an experimental investigation and numerical analysis is used to study the effect of geometrical parameters on fatigue life span. The experimental parts include monotonic tensile test and hardness test of welded joints of steel S355JR laser butt welded joint. A parametric finite element analysis is performed by using ANSYS 11 software to investigate the effect of plate thickness (h) and weld toe radius (r) in butt welded joint on fatigue life.  Different values of plate thickness and radius of weld toe have been investigated during this study; the results indicate that  increasing the plate thickness and radius of weld toe will improve the stress distribution in the joint and increase the fatigue life span of welded joint.