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On the influence of weld porosity on fatigue strength

Conference Paper · October 2016

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Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM
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S22-2 October 13th (Thursday)

On the influence of weld porosity on fatigue strength


Dieter Siegele, Peter Tempel, Majid Farajian
Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM, Freiburg, Germany
dieter.siegele@iwm.fraunhofer.de, +49-761-5142116

Abstract
Weld quality could have a significant influence on the fatigue strength of welded components. The correlation
between weld imperfections and fatigue strength is defined in different guidelines as IIW-recommendations or the
German guideline DVS 0705 in a conservative manner. In order to assess the influence of weld porosity on fatigue
strength in a more accurate way, experimental and numerical investigations on welded specimens with internal
pores were performed. Experimentally, the specimens were tested under cyclic loading until failure and finally, the
fracture surfaces were evaluated with respect to the size and location of the defects and the fracture behavior.
Numerically the specimens were simulated including the inner pores and evaluated regarding the number of
cycles to crack initiation and crack propagation, respectively.
Besides the conventional approach to fatigue assessment of welded components based on their fatigue classes, the
applicability of the fatigue damage parameter according to Fatemi and Socie was examined in order to estimate
the fatigue life until the formation of a crack from the initial pore. The remaining life until failure was estimated
using fracture mechanics methods in combination with the fatigue crack growth curve da/dN. The results
demonstrate that in general the number of cycles until crack formation is larger than the cycles of crack
propagation until failure. Therefore, the assumption of the pore as a sharp crack would underestimate the fatigue
life significantly. With the combination of both methods, the estimation of crack formation using an appropriate
damage parameter and crack extension based on fracture mechanics the fatigue life of welded plates with internal
pores can be described in accordance with the experiments.

Introduction
If a welded construction is loaded under fatigue, the rules and standards always recommend the highest weld
quality [1]. Therefore, the weld had to be proven with respect to its quality using nondestructive methods as visual
proof and ultrasonic techniques. The weld quality consist of several categories in terms of weld imperfections:
surface imperfections as weld notches, excessive peaking or cracks and internal imperfections as pores, inclusions
or incomplete fusion. For a safe use of a welded construction the imperfections have to be assessed if they can be
tolerated or how such imperfections could influence the strength of the component. The assessment groups of
weld imperfections and their correlation to fatigue classes are defined in different standards and guidelines as DIN
EN ISO 5817 [2], DVS guideline 0705 [3], or IIW recommendations [4]. But in general, these recommendations
are based on experimental investigations on specimens or real components welded under normal production
conditions. These constructions could contain high tensile residual stresses besides the imperfections that could
have reduced the fatigue strength significantly. Also the type of an imperfection and its location in the stress strain
field play an important role with respect to the components lifetime. All these factors could influence the
assessment of imperfections and its correlation with fatigue classes. Therefore, the different guidelines show some
differences in the classification of assessment groups and fatigue classes [4, 5].

As an alternative to traditional methodology for fatigue assessment, computational methods can be employed
based on numerically determined stress and strain fields and appropriate fatigue damage models, see e.g. [6], [7],
[8]. Such an approach can facilitate to transfer of different types of welded joints, and to estimate fatigue lives of
components with different geometry and/or loading conditions. In this paper a methodology for the fatigue
assessment of weld imperfections based on finite element calculations will be presented. The procedure
concentrates on internal defects as pores but can be transferred also to other weld imperfections. The procedure
contains the estimation of lifetime until formation of a crack nucleated from the defect as well as the lifetime until
final failure due to crack propagation. The procedure is supported and validated by experiments on welded
specimens with internal defects. The proposed methodology allows for the new classification of defects to fatigue
classes as well as the assessment of individual weld imperfections.

Method
Fatigue damage models describe the stress strain field in terms of a suitable parameter and correlate them with the
Woehler-Curve, i.e. the number of load cycles to failure. Since these fatigue damage parameter (FDP) are based

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