A simplified approach to estimate the fatigue life of full-scale welded cast steel thin-walled tubular structures

Abstract

Abstract Cast steel joints (CSJ) are widely used in complex tubular structures to connect different parts of structures. This paper presents a simplified approach for efficient fatigue life estimation of full-scale welded cast steel structures. The proposed approach is applied to analyze a set of fatigue data of a full-scale CSJ thin-walled tubular truss structure. The results indicate that the fatigue lives estimated based on the simplified approach compare well with the experimental data. It is also shown that the simplified approach is much more efficient than the classical three-dimensional finite element-based method.