09.17: Fatigue life of marked steel components

Abstract

ABSTRACTSteel components have to be identifiable and traceable during the whole manufacturing chain. The choice of the identification method is not specified consistently in international rules and standards. The European standard for the execution of steel structures EN 1090‐2 specifies that the use of durable marks may not result in producing damages without saying which damages are meant. Hard stamped marks are only permitted for steel grades up to S355 and only in areas where no effect on the fatigue life is expected. Otherwise the use of soft stamps should be verified. In other international standards hard stamped marks are explicitly required. These contradictions should be resolved.In terms of durability and liability, markings should be resistant against particular manufacturing processes such as sandblasting, hot‐dip galvanizing or coating. For this reason, the following marking methods are used in practical applications: hard stamping, scribing, plasma marking and needling.Nowadays the machinery manufacturers have developed machines in which the marking process can be automatically integrated in the manufacturing process of steel components so that manual layout scribing is not required anymore and components can be marked on the fly. However, the effect of the installed notch due to the marking process on the fatigue strength of the components has not been investigated yet. As a result, a classification of the resulting notched details according to the European detail categories of EN 1993‐1‐9 is in principle not possible.For these reasons, the influence of durable marking methods on the fatigue strength of steel components needs to be clarified by experimental fatigue tests and numerical calculations which have been performed at the Institute for Metal and Lightweight Structures of the University of Duisburg‐Essen. Within these investigations the different marking methods hard stamped, scribed, plasma marked and needled as well as unmarked structural details have been examined. The experimental investigations have been carried out considering three different steel plate thicknesses 15 mm, 25 mm and 40 mm and two different steel grades S355J2 and S460N.As expected the marked specimens show a decrease of the loading cycles until failure even though there are differences in fatigue life due to the different markings and their characteristic notch geometries.