Mapping of scatter in fatigue life assessment of welded structures-a round-robin study

A round-robin study has been carried out within a national project in Sweden with the addition of an international participant, where several industrial partners and universities are participating. The project aims to identify variation and sources of variation in welding production, map scatter in fatigue life estimation, and define and develop concepts to reduce these, in all steps of product development. The participating organisations were asked to carry out fatigue life assessment of welded box structures, which is a component in load-carrying structures. The estimations of fatigue life have also been compared with fatigue test results. Detailed drawings, loads and material data were also given to the participants. The participants were supposed to use assessment methods based on global and local stresses using the design codes or recommendations they currently use in-house. Differences were identified between both methods and participants using the same codes/recommendations. Applicability and conditions from the cases in the codes were also identified to be differently evaluated between the participants. It could be concluded that for the applied cases the nominal stress method often overestimated the fatigue life and had a high scatter in the estimations by different participants. The effective notch method is conservative in comparison to the life of tested components with little scatter between the results derived by the participants.