Use of the Peak Stress Method to assess the fatigue life of large welded steel structures

Abstract

A precise life assessment of weld seams in large welded steel structures such as the ones from crawler excavators is very important in order to be able to optimize these structures. The local stress approaches with fictitious notch radius have been proved to be necessary to achieve the desired precision in some cases. Unfortunately, these methods are very time and resources consuming making it impossible to be applied systematically on large steel structures.The Peak Stress Method (PSM) could be an alternative since its precision seems to be good and that the method is much easier to apply.This paper shows the results of the tests that have been done on PSM applied to large steel structures from hydraulic excavators. Comparisons have been made in terms of precision and speed with the fictitious notch radius method.