Abstract
Ageing infrastructure has been a significant concern for different industrial sectors across Europe. Fatigue cracking is one of the most important damage mechanisms that affect structural health of welded steel structures. Fatigue assessment of welded details in large, complex structures is a difficult and time consuming task. In this paper a numerical framework for fatigue assessment of welded details is presented. In view of industrial applications, automated hot spot stress algorithms for plate and tubular joints were developed and integrated in the framework. The framework provides practicing engineers with an effective tool for fatigue assessment of different components in conformity with leading design codes. Furthermore, apart from Miner’s rule the framework allows easy implementation of different non-linear damage accumulation models in order to account for load interaction and load sequence effects.
Highlights
Ageing infrastructure has been a significant concern for different industrial sectors across Europe
Within the SafeLife project, the focus is on welded steel structures, such as offshore jackets, railway bridges and crane runway girders
Determination of the extrapolation directions As mentioned above, the input of the hot spot stress algorithm are ASCII files that contain the node sets of the surfaces that are joined by the weld as well as a node set containing the nodes of the weld surface
Summary
Ageing infrastructure has been a significant concern for different industrial sectors across Europe. Structural health monitoring; Fatigue; Hot spot stress; Finite element analysis; Endurance approach; Crane girder. A combination of load monitoring and finite element modeling can be used to obtain accurate hot spot stresses for fatigue analysis [12].
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