Abstract
Detailed understandings on the fatigue behavior of the concrete-filled double skin steel tubes (CFDSTs) under multiaxial stress states are essential to promote their applications in marine structures. A systematical investigation consisting both the experimental study and the according numerical modeling has been conducted. Physical tests were carried out to investigate the flexural fatigue behavior of the butt-welded hollow steel tubes (HSTs), concrete-filled steel tubes (CFSTs) and CFDSTs, in which the development of fatigue cracks and the fatigue life were captured. The feasibility of applying the existing S–N curves originally obtained from the HSTs to the constitutive steel tubes within the CFDSTs has been consequently verified. A two-stages simulation method was developed to analyze the full range development of fatigue cracks based on both the damage mechanics and the extended finite element method (XFEM). The influence of the multiaxial stress states on the fatigue behavior for the constitutive steel tubes was studied quantitatively, considering the offshore application scenarios where the steel tubes within the CFDSTs were subjected to larger external hydrostatic pressure or internal transmitted content pressure. The results show that the existence of the infilled concrete can effectively improve the fatigue behavior of the steel tubes. The life prediction models for both the fatigue crack initiation stage and propagation stage have been proposed, where the crack initiation life of the steel tube may reduce by 30% when its stress triaxiality increases from 0.36 to 0.48.
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