Recent Developments in Japanese Flaw Assessment Methods of WES 2805

Abstract

The standard for the method of assessment for flaws in the welded joints of WES 2805 was first published in 1976 and was revised in 1980 and 1997. A further revision has been carried out by the technical committee of FTS in the Japan Welding Engineering Society and the revision was completed in 2007. The standard of WES 2805 is based on a CTOD (crack tip opening displacement) design curve approach for brittle fracture, and is used for the assessment of the significance of flaws in a stress concentrated region, where large scale yielding takes place. Main topics for the recent developments for flaw assessment methods are described in this paper. These are the interaction criterion of multiple flaws, fatigue crack growth laws, determination of equivalent crack length and strain due to stress concentration, estimation method of the critical CTOD from Charpy energy and proposal of partial safety factors. In order to examine the effectiveness of the standard, extensive 2-D and 3-D FE analyses are performed for various welded joints such as a load-carrying fillet welded joint, a non-load-carrying fillet welded joint and a box welded joint. Some of them are introduced in this paper. Their analytical results indicate that the present CTOD design curve method gives a reasonable evaluation.