Abstract
At present, fatigue design of welded structures is primarily based on a nominal stress or hot spot stress approach with a series of classified weld S-N curves. Although well accepted by major industries, the nominal stress based fatigue design approach is cumbersome in terms of securing a series of S-N curves corresponding to each class of joint types and loading modes. The hot spot stress based fatigue design has a difficulty of finding a proper stress through the global model, the midium size model, and the detail model of ship structure. Also, it is difficult to link proper displacements within three different mesh size models. Recently, the structural stress is proposed as a mesh-size insensitive structural stress definition that gives a stress state at weld toe with relatively large mesh size. However, this method requires an experimental validation in obtaining the fatigue strength of weldments. Therefore, in this study, a series of experiment is performed for various sizes of weldments.
