High-Cycle Fatigue Strength and Residual Stress in Welded Joints of Structural Steels

Abstract

Improvement of high-cycle fatigue strength by reducing residual stress in welded joints is studied in this paper. 10% Nickel and 10% Chromium are involved in the developed welding material for producing the property of thermal shrinkage by martensitic phase transformation at a low temperature and for generating compressive residual stress during cooling process. A cruciform fillet-welded joint is used for the numerical simulation of the thermal elastic-plastic finite-element analysis with coupling phase transformation effect. Distribution of the computed residual stress agrees with the measuring values by strain gauge. Compressive residual stress mostly distributes in the weld metal for both longitudinal and transverse directions with weld line. Fatigue test is also performed in order to clarify the effect of the developed weld material on fatigue strength. Developed weld metal has much higher characteristics for high-cycle fatigue strength than a conventional one. Increase effect of fatigue strength is shown by the modified Goodman diagram when residual stress is treated as mean stress. Weld metal with the property of low-temperature phase transformation is effective to reduce residual stress and to improve fatigue strength.