Fatigue design of plated structures using structural hot spot stress approach

Paper in proceeding, 2012

In most fatigue design codes, the nominal stress method is the predominant approach for fatigue design of structures. However, the known limitations of this method along with new advanced computational possibilities, have paved the way to search for more accurate stress based fatigue design approaches. The structural hot spot stress approach (SHSS) is one of these methods which has drawn a wide-spread attention since its advent. The SHSS designates the basic stress by taking into account the geometrical variations of the detail at the location of expected fatigue crack initiation (hot spot). In this paper, the fatigue strength of several frequently used structural details is investigated using both nominal stress and SHSS approaches. The aim of this investigation is to establish an equivalency between these two approaches with reference to the fatigue strengths of the studied details. A large database including available fatigue test results (from 1950s till present) is built up and used to produce hot spot stress S-N curves for the studied details.