Stress concentrations in square hollow section joints

Welded square hollow section joints exhibit stress concentrations near the welds, which may result in failure under cyclic loading. The paper presents results on the development of an FE-interface written in Turbo Pascal which, for several combinations of joint parameters, automatically generated the FE-meshes incl, load cases, etc. which are suitable for analysing stress concentrations independent of support conditions. Several types of joints, uniplanar as well as multiplanar, are included. For the programming, special attention was paid to numerical aspects like mesh refinement, weld shape modelling, integration scheme, element type and boundary conditions. Because of the progress on computer hardware, all FE-models consist of 20-n solid elements only, including the weld shape modelling. For one type of joint, the so-called T-joint, the influence of the joint parameters on the stress concentration factors has been studied. The results obtained are compared with existing parametric formulae.