Numerical predictions of the fatigue life of aluminium welded joints

The fatigue life of arc welded joints made of aluminium alloy has been investigated by means of the implicit gradient method. This approach is suitable for estimating the fatigue life of welded joints characterised by different opening angles of the fillet weld and different thicknesses. The main fatigue data are related to cruciform joints, rectangular hollow section T-joints and bead removed joints. Using the principal stress as the local equivalent stress and a notch tip of the weld toe radius equal to zero, the paper analyses about two hundred experimental data taken from the literature and proposes a universal scatter band in the range of 104 to 5·106 cycles. This scatter band has an inverse slope around 4 and, at high cycle fatigue, the strength is about half that of steel joints. However, the scatter band is similar to welded joints made of steel previously analysed