Abstract
Several fatigue damages have recently been reported which cannot be resolved in the context of the existing fatigue design procedure, and they are suspected to be the cracks induced by the low cycle fatigue mechanism. To tackle the problem, a series of material tests together with fatigue tests have been carried out, and elasto-plastic notch strain analysis using nonlinear kinematic hardening model has been performed. The cyclic stress-strain curves are obtained and the nonlinear kinematic hardening model was calibrated based on the obtained material data. Also, the fatigue test with non-load-carrying cruciform fillet welded joint has been performed in low cycle fatigue regime. Then, the notch strain analyses have been carried out to find the precise elasto-plastic behavior of the material at the notch root of the cruciform joint. The variation of the material property from the base metal via HAZ up to the weld metal was taken into account using spatial variation of the material property. Then the detail elasto-plastic behavior of the welded joint subjected to the repeated cyclic loading has been investigated further through the comparison with the prediction with Neuber's rule. The calibration of the nonlinear kinematic hardening model and nonlinear notch strain analyses have been performed using the commercial FE program ABAQUS.
