Method of fatigue life prediction for spot welded structure

The nominal structural stress calculation method proposed by Radaj has included some problems as follows: (a) How the value of the diameter D is decided in the method; (b) It is not possible to estimate nominal structural stress of the spot welded joints with the balanced sheet in-plane load that no general loads are obtained by FIE shell analysis. In this paper, the new method for calculating nominal structural stress was proposed to solve above-mentioned problems. The proposed method calculates the nominal structural stress through the circular plate theory in theory of elasticity. This theoretical analysis uses not only general loads but also nodal displacements around spot welding provided by FE shell analysis as boundary condition. Fatigue test data of various spot-welded joints could be arranged in a narrow bandwidth on S-N chart using the nominal structural stresses calculated by proposed method. The fatigue life prediction method using the proposed method for calculating nominal structural stress is useful for the prior evaluation technique that can predict the fatigue life of spot welding by CAE.