Investigation of the fatigue behaviour of butt-welded joints treated by ultrasonic peening process and compared with fatigue life assessment standards

Abstract

Ultrasonic peening is a technique to be used for improving the fatigue life of welded structures. The technique makes use of an ultrasonically vibrated pin which is pressed against the toe regions of the weld. The beneficial effect is mainly due to the introduction of favourable compressive stresses on weld toe regions, causing local plastic deformation and reducing stress concentration effect. This paper deals with the influence of ultrasonic peening treatment on fatigue life improvement in butt-welded plates. Fatigue life is predicted for the welded plate as per BS 7608 standard, AWS D 1.1 structural welding code and IIW-XIII-1539-96 standard, and they are compared with the experimental results. The ultrasonic peening technique is applied on a plain carbon steel plate weldment, and specimens conforming to ASTM E 466 standard are prepared and tested in a servohydraulic static dynamic testing machine at three different stress levels. Afterwards their fatigue lives are obtained. The comparison of the fatigue life in unpeened and peened specimens brings out the beneficial influence of the treatment. It is found that the improvement in fatigue life is up to 35% at 250 MPa of applied stress. But at higher stress levels, the benefit is less. At 350 MPa of applied stress, peening results in lower fatigue life. A comparison of the predicted fatigue lives from various standards with the experimental results shows that it is very close to the life at 50% probability of survival as predicted by the BS 7608 standard. The details of the experiments conducted and the results obtained are furnished in this paper.