Fatigue behaviour of a welded I-section under a concentrated compression (wheel) load

Title

Fatigue behaviour of a welded I-section under a concentrated compression (wheel) load

 Author

Wardenier, J. (TU Delft Steel & Composite Structures; National University of Singapore)
de Vries, P.A. (TU Delft Steel & Composite Structures)
Timmerman, Gerrit (PT Structural Design & Analysis B.V.)

Date

2018-01-01

 Abstract

This paper deals with the evaluation of fatigue cracks under a concentrated compression (wheel) load in an I-section with full penetration welds between the web and flange. The objective is to investigate whether cracks stop or nearly stop when they have grown through the residual tensile stress field. These experimental investigations are part of a review of a crane runway girder where after 20 years of service fatigue cracks were observed in the flange at the toe of the full penetration weld. The fatigue analysis of the actual crane runway girder is described in (Wardenier et al., 2017). The fatigue tests under a concentrated wheel compression loading show that, for the specimens considered on a scale of about 1:2 with stiffeners at one side, the cracks only initiate and grow at the non-stiffened side to about 50 to 60% of the web thickness and then stop. Based only on the nominal stress range under the wheel, determined according to EN 1993-6 and neglecting the shear stress effect, an equivalent fatigue class of about 160 N/mm2 was found for crack initiation in the web, whereas the minimum ratio in life between visually observed crack initiation and maximum crack length was about a factor 3. Comparison of the codes for a wheel loading in compression shows large discrepancies in effective width and fatigue classes to be used.


 Subject

Compression load
Crack growth
Crane runway girder
Fatigue
Fatigue cracks
Residual tensile stresses

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:eba728f9-492a-42c1-a379-5617f5f8c563

 DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcsr.2017.10.027

 Embargo date

2019-11-05

 ISSN

0143-974X

 Source

Journal of Constructional Steel Research, 140, 163-173

 Part of collection

Institutional Repository

 Document type

journal article

 Rights

© 2018 J. Wardenier, P.A. de Vries, Gerrit Timmerman
Files
PDF Text_JCSR_2017_240_tables.pdf 367.25 KB
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