Fatigue crack shapes development of plate-to-plate welded joints

This paper presents crack shapes development of 3D surface semielliptical cracks which are always found at the weld toe of non-load-carrying cruciform welded joints. The alternating current potential drop technique has been used to measure the eight crack depths along the weld toe where probes are placed at 10-mm intervals. 3D crack shapes can be obtained at any particular cycle during the fatigue test. Subregion boundary element methods incorporating the transition and quarter-point elements along the crack front are used to validate the experimental stress intensity factors along the crack front. A method for evaluating the effective stress intensity factors is proposed. It is found that the numerical results generally agree with the experimental results.