Automated fatigue life assessment for welded cruciform joint considering welding residual stress

For a rational design of a welded joint, it is necessary to repeatedly assess the fatigue life of the joint with various dimensions and welding conditions. In this paper, an automated, repeatable/repetitive fatigue life assessment process for a welded cruciform joint was studied. The process consists of a structural analysis to obtain the stress distribution in the vicinity of the weldtoe, a thermal elasto-plastic analysis to determine the welding residual stress, and a fatigue life assessment based on the analyzed stress distribution and welding residual stress. With changes in design conditions including dimensions and/or welding heat input, the aforementioned tasks have to be performed. Using a commercial tool for system integration, automation of a repeated process for a welded cruciform joint based on 2D modeling was achieved. In this automated system, data exchanges between programs, regardless of whether they are commercial or in-house, work well, and parametric studies for optimal design can be performed.