Investigations on the fatigue behaviour of welded cover plates with extended weld seams

Nowadays the necessity to design lightweight structures and reducing the use of resources is more important than ever. Normally, cover plates are used as a local strengthening for an optimised load bearing in all kind of steel structures like steel bridges. Under cyclic loading, this notch detail exhibits a worse fatigue behaviour due to the geometrically induced notch factor at the end of the cover plate. By using extended weld seams the stress concentration of this detail can be reduced by a continuous and smooth transition between the ground and the cover plate and thus the fatigue strength can be improved. By using different post weld treatment methods, the fatigue strength could be raised further. Unfortunately, there are almost no experimental results in literature dealing with extended weld seams for any notch detail, even when this type of detail is already used for different construction machines.

Within this paper systematic experimental research on possible influencing factors for extended weld seams will be presented.