Engineering Fracture Mechanics 98 (2013) 4451

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Engineering Fracture Mechanics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/engfracmech

A boundary element analysis of fatigue crack growth for welded

connections under bending
Tao Chen a,, Zhi-Gang Xiao b, Xiao-Ling Zhao c, Xiang-Lin Gu a
a

Department of Building Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China

School of Applied Sciences and Engineering, Monash University, Churchill, VIC 3842, Australia
c
Department of Civil Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia
b

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 5 July 2012
Received in revised form 21 November 2012
Accepted 20 December 2012

Keywords:
Boundary element method
Crack growth life
Welded connections
Bending

a b s t r a c t
Transverse llet welded joints and circular hollow section (CHS)-to-plate welded connections were analyzed to obtain crack growth life under bending. Based on a 3D boundary
element model, an initial semi-elliptical surface crack was embedded at the weld toe.
Thereafter, crack propagation was performed with Paris law and strain energy density criterion. This method discards the assumption of constant aspect ratio of crack shape during
propagation stage. Numerical results were compared with the experimental results in the
literature. It is found that numerical analysis is reliable and the boundary element method
is suitable for estimating the fatigue crack growth life.
2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Fatigue performance of welded connections is essential to the integrity of metallic structures that are subjected to fatigue
loading. Based on fatigue tests, guidelines have been established for the welded connections [14]. Structural stress is usually employed for design purpose [5]. However, small defects and initial cracks are inevitable for these welded connections.
Fatigue life of the welded connections is identied as the crack propagation life [6]. Consider the fact that it is expensive to
manufacture specimens and conduct fatigue tests, numerical analysis for crack propagation is necessary to have a better
understanding of the welded connections. It is accepted that the fracture mechanics method is a reliable approach for the
crack growth life prediction under fatigue loading.
The crack propagation analysis is usually conducted with Paris law [7], and a reliable stress intensity factor (K) is required.
Previous researches show that the stress intensity factors are difcult to obtain through experimental or theoretical analysis.
Close form solutions for stress intensity factors are often insufcient for complicated practical components such as the circular hollow steel tubes [8]. To solve this problem, numerical analysis has been employed. The numerical analysis is usually
conducted with the nite element method and the crack shape and crack path have to be determined before modeling [9,10].
It requires a very extensive 3D element mesh with crack tip elements. Therefore, different kinds of assumptions or fatigue
tests have to be conducted to nd out the crack shape and crack path. The crack is usually assumed to be a semi-elliptical
crack with a xed aspect ratio [10,11]. This is not true since the crack shape can change with the crack propagation. Fatigue
tests of transverse welded joints under bending revealed that the ratio of the crack depth to crack length on the surface varies with fatigue loading cycles [12]. The boundary element method (BEM) has been employed as an efcient numerical
method to solve crack propagation together with the technique of dual boundary element method (DBEM) [1315]. This
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: t.chen@tongji.edu.cn, brucecht@gmail.com (T. Chen).
0013-7944/$ - see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.engfracmech.2012.12.010

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T. Chen et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 98 (2013) 4451

Nomenclature
a, c
C, m
d
D
h
K
Keff
KI
KII
KIII
L
N
S
t
ta
T
W

crack lengths in two directions for semi elliptical crack

material constants for Paris law
tube diameter of CHS-to-plate welded connection
bolt hole diameter of base plate in CHS-to-plate welded connection
transverse attachment height of transverse welded joint
stress intensity factor
effective stress intensity factor
stress intensity factor in (opening) mode I
stress intensity factor in mode II
stress intensity factor in mode III
base plate length of transverse welded joint
number of fatigue cycles
nominal stress
tube thickness of CHS-to-plate welded connection
transverse attachment thickness of transverse welded joint
base plate thickness of transverse welded joint
base plate width of transverse welded joint

method can efciently solve the crack growth problem since re-meshing is signicantly reduced during the crack growth
process.
The purpose of this research is to numerically determine realistic crack growth lives for an initial surface crack at the weld
toe of transverse llet welded plate and circular hollow section (CHS)-to-plate welded connection under bending. Stress
intensity factors were quantied at the crack tip. With Paris law and strain energy density criterion, fatigue crack growth
lives were calculated and compared with fatigue test results. Crack patterns were also compared with available beach
marking.

2. Geometry of the specimens

2.1. Transverse welded joints
The basic geometry of welded joint is shown in Fig. 1 [12]. It consists of a base plate with a thickness T and a width W. A
transverse attachment, which has a thickness ta and a height h, is welded to one side by llet welding with a 6 mm weld leg
length. Four point bending fatigue tests were conducted on transverse llet welded joints to study the effect of the base plate
thickness. The middle part of the specimen was subjected to pure bending moment. Two specimens with the main plate
thickness of 9 mm and 34 mm, respectively, were selected to analyze. Values of 2.0  105 MPa and 0.3 were assumed for
Youngs modulus and Poissons ratio in following simulations.
2.2. Circular hollow section (CHS)-to-plate welded connections
Circular hollow sections are popular in civil engineering for their superior structural properties [3,5]. Mashiri and Zhao
[16,17] conducted fatigue tests in plane bending for CHS-to-plate welded connections. The welded connections were made
from tubes of grade C350LO, which conform to the Australian Standard for Structural Steel Hollow Sections, AS1163-1991

ta
h
T

2c
a

Specimen

ta

PC9

16

180

50

40

PC34

34

16

400

90

40

Fig. 1. Geometry congurations of transverse welded joint (unit: mm).

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T. Chen et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 98 (2013) 4451

Loading point

12

62

Specimen
d

C7P
C8P
C9P

250

t
A

d
48.3
42.4
42.4

t
3.2
2.6
2.0

10

D =18
Tension side
200
120

Compression side
Weld bead
200
Cross section A-A

Fig. 2. Geometry congurations of CHS-to-plate welded connection (unit: mm).

[18]. The tubes have a specied Youngs modulus of 2.0  105 MPa and a specied Poissons ratio of 0.3. Three wall thicknesses, which were 2.0 mm, 2.6 mm and 3.2 mm, respectively, of the circular hollow section were chosen. A square base
plate of 10 mm thickness is bolted to the strong ground oor (Fig. 2). The tube is llet welded to the base plate with a
4 mm weld leg length.
3. Fatigue life prediction
3.1. Fatigue crack growth analysis with boundary element method (BEM)
The boundary element method has been employed as an efcient way of numerical analysis for its boundary only meshing. With DBEM technique, it can solve the cracked single domain and predict crack propagation without re-meshing. The
commercial software package BEASY [15] has a wizard named Crack Growth that can fulll these functions. In this study,
the stress intensity factors are determined by J-integral approach [19]. The crack propagation life is integrated with Paris law.
This method can accurately predict the fatigue behavior and it is only dependent on material constants and the stress intensity factors.
The crack growth is predicted by Paris law, expressed as follows:

da
CDK eff m
dN

where a is the crack depth, N is the number of cycles for crack propagation life, C and m are the material constants, 4Keff is
the effective stress intensity factor range.

DK eff K eff;max  K eff;min

where Keff is the effective stress intensity factor for mixed-mode problems, which is represented as [20]:

DK eff

q
K I jK III j2 2K 2II

Keff,max and Keff,min are the maximum and the minimum effective stress intensity factor at the crack tip. KI, KII and KIII are
stress intensity factors of mode I, mode II and mode III, respectively.
With the previous equations, fatigue crack growth lives of the cracked specimens in mixed-mode conditions can be
calculated with Paris law.
During the calculation, the crack propagation direction should be determined. It is dependent on the local stress and displacement eld under mixed loading conditions. It changes continuously with each step. The method to compute the growth

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T. Chen et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 98 (2013) 4451

angle is based on strain energy density criterion [21]. The criterion assumes that a fracture spreads in the direction of the
minimum strain energy density.
3.2. Model generation process
Model establishment is jointly fullled by ABAQUS nite element package and BEASY boundary element package. In the
rst step, nite element models are created and analyzed on un-cracked specimens. A critical node can be tracked after analysis. Thereafter, the ABAQUS les of these models are transferred to BEASY model les with special BEASYABAQUS Wizard.
Special care should be taken to check the loads and other boundary conditions. If some boundary conditions are lost during
the transference, they need to be added in BEASY manually. Quadrilateral surface element is specied during modeling. ABAQUS is used in creating the pre-crack models mainly because of its user-friendly and powerful preprocessing platform.
Compared to the complicated nite element modeling of crack shape [22], it is relatively easy to dene a crack in the
BEASY. An initial crack can be dened in the un-cracked specimen with the special Crack Wizard module in the BEASY package. The location of the crack is determined with the numerical analysis in ABAQUS. The maximum principal stress was
found located on one node at the weld toe. This is consistent with the test results, in spite of the fact that several fatigue
cracks emerged at the initial stage and coalesced into a single crack. For simplication, the initial crack is assumed to emanate from the node with the maximum principal stress at the weld toe. A semi-elliptical crack can be dened by initial crack
sizes, a and c (Fig. 1). Here, a is crack depth and c is half crack length. The crack propagates with Paris law in depth and
length directions without xed ratio a/c. This is more reasonable compared to the xed aspect ratio in conventional nite
element analysis. Material parameters C and m are inputted before numerical analysis. Increment steps and increment size
are also dened after several trials. The les of results in BEASY are converted to the le format that can be displayed in the
ABAQUS. This is convenient for display of crack pattern in the post process.
4. Results and discussions
4.1. Fatigue life of transverse welded joints under bending
As described in the previous section, the transverse welded joint models were created and analyzed. Material related constants, C and m, for Paris law were taken as 3.98  1013 (da/dN in mm/cycle and K in N/mm3/2) and 2.88 [4,23]. The constants were chosen for consistency with the previous work of the authors [23]. An initial semi-elliptical crack of
a = c = 0.1 mm was dened at a location based on numerical analysis by ABAQUS.
Table 1 gives the total number of cycles, incremental cycles and crack sizes at each increment for specimens PC9 and PC34
under a pure bending moment that can introduce the maximum nominal tensile stress range of 100 MPa on the plate surface. It is observed that cracks propagated faster in the surface direction than in the depth direction. With regard to specimen
PC9, the crack depth propagated to 3.76 mm, i.e. 42% of the thickness, after 10th increment and terminated at 4.85 mm (54%
of the thickness) after 18th increment. The numerical analysis terminated due to convergence problems. With regard to
specimen PC34, the crack depth propagated to 9.67 mm (28% of the thickness) after 10th increment and terminated at

Table 1
Fatigue crack growth results of transverse llet welded joints (nominal stress range = 100 MPa).
Increment

0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19

PC9

PC34

DN

a (mm)

c (mm)

DN

a (mm)

c (mm)

0
989460
1417797
1988565
2642860
3255278
3820917
4417627
4889065
5257618
5703636
6082890
6386468
6646182
6918448
7403647
8046777
8549238
9370276
NA

0
989460
428338
570768
654295
612418
565639
596710
471438
368553
446017
379255
303577
259715
272266
485198
643131
502461
821038
NA

0.10
0.43
0.96
1.35
1.78
2.14
2.47
2.84
3.14
3.42
3.76
3.94
4.11
4.19
4.33
4.49
4.59
4.70
4.85
NA

0.10
1.17
1.60
2.52
3.39
4.30
5.32
6.32
7.27
8.22
9.23
10.19
11.10
11.96
12.85
13.64
14.43
15.15
15.97
NA

0
1426821
1736207
2148541
2525813
2829809
3105025
3361359
3633375
3897456
4149273
4382042
4547593
4684380
4810922
4916492
5007478
5084611
5138779
5172276

0
1426821
309386
412334
377272
303996
275216
256334
272016
264081
251817
232769
165551
136787
126542
105570
90986
77133
54168
33497

0.10
0.90
1.72
2.81
3.96
5.00
5.98
6.98
7.93
8.81
9.67
10.46
11.05
11.65
12.42
13.13
13.70
14.10
14.48
14.92

0.10
2.64
3.47
5.17
7.28
9.22
11.25
13.19
15.44
17.81
20.10
22.52
26.28
29.17
31.63
34.01
36.41
38.30
40.34
42.23

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T. Chen et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 98 (2013) 4451

14.92 mm (44% of the thickness) after 19th increment. The crack propagated very fast in the nal stage, and fatigue failure of
welded joints is dened when the crack propagates to 40% of the plate thickness in Ref. [24]. It is therefore appropriate to
take the numerical results when 4050% of the plate thickness has cracked as the nal fatigue life.
The SIFs determined by the J-integral approach, which are essential to estimate the crack propagation analytically, were
plotted with the normalized crack fronts for specimen PC9 in Fig. 3. The stress intensity factors of KI and Keff were nearly
symmetrical with respect to the crack center and reached the maximum values at crack ends on the surface. The stress intensity factors of KII and KIII were negligibly small in comparison with KI. Similar trend was also observed for specimen PC34. The
results indicate that mode I (opening mode) is the primary fracture mode.
A comparison of measured and simulated crack shapes near the weld seam is given in Fig. 4. The ratio between two semiaxes, a/c, changed from the initial value of 1.0 to 0.4 (in the 10th increment) and 0.3 (in the 18th increment). This indicated
that the crack aspect ratio kept changing instead of being constant as assumed by most researches. The nding was veried
by comparison with the beach marks taken from experimental observations [12].
The results of LEFM calculations are plotted with the fatigue test data of transverse llet welded joints under bending in
Fig. 5. The estimated results are in agreement with the thickness effect, i.e., the fatigue strength decreases with the increase
of plate thickness. The predicted SN curve of PC9 is below all the fatigue data of this series while the predicted SN curve of
PC34 is close to the mean value of the fatigue test data.

4.2. Fatigue life of CHS-to-plate welded connections under in plane bending

In this section, thin-walled CHS-to-plate welded connections were analyzed with the boundary element method. Based
on the fatigue test results of Mashiri and Zhao [16,17], cracks initiated along the weld toe on the tube tension side surface of
tube plate weld connection and were observed as surface cracks. With the fatigue loading being applied, the cracks propagated into the thickness of the tube and became through-thickness cracks. Finally, cracks extended along the circumference
of tube and broke the weld connection. In the numerical modeling, only one surface crack was dened before it reached
through thickness. Corresponding fatigue life was calculated and compared to the fatigue test results of the joints under
in-plane bending at a stress ratio of 0.1.
The values for material constants of Paris law were chosen from the conservative curves as recommended by the Japanese Society of Steel Construction. They were taken as C = 2.02  1012 (da/dN in mm/cycle and K in N/mm3/2) and m = 2.75
[1]. The constants are chosen to include the high tensile residual stress induced by welding process which is critical to thinwalled tubular connections. An initial semi-elliptical crack with a = c = 0.1 mm was dened as in the previous sections.
The total number of cycles, incremental cycles and crack sizes were tabulated in Table 2 for three series of CHS-to-plate
welded connections under in plane bending. The surface crack propagated with the increments. With regard to specimen
C7P, the crack depth propagated to 2.06 mm after 5th increment, being about 64% of the thickness, and terminated at
3.02 mm after 8th increment, being about 94% of the thickness. With regard to specimen C8P, the crack depth propagated
to 1.71 mm after 5th increment, being about 66% of the thickness, and terminated at 2.48 mm after 8th increment, being
about 95% of the thickness. With regard to specimen C9P, the crack depth propagated to 1.33 mm after 5th increment, being
about 67% of the thickness, and terminated at 1.99 mm after 8th increment, being about 99.5% of the thickness.
Stress intensity factors are important to crack growth rate and fatigue mechanism in the welded connections. They were
calculated with J-integral method and graphed in Fig. 6. Comparisons with various stress intensity factors indicated that the
mixed mode crack growths are mainly dominated by mode I crack growth.

Stress intensity factor (MPa mm1/2)

300
250
Keff
1
0
Normalized crack front

200
150

KI

100
KIII

50
0
10

th

KII

increment (a=3.76mm, c=9.23mm)

-50
0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

Normalized crack front

Fig. 3. SIFs along the crack fronts for PC9 (nominal stress range = 100 MPa).

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T. Chen et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 98 (2013) 4451

10th increment
a=3.76 mm, c=9.23 mm

18th increment
a=4.85 mm, c=15.97 mm

(a) Numerical simulations (Nominal stress range =100MPa)

10mm

(b) Beach marks from Mikis fatigue tests

Fig. 4. Fracture modes of specimen PC9 (nominal stress range = 100 MPa).

400

Nominal stress range (MPa)

300
200

100
80
PC34

60

PC9

40
Transverse weled joints PC9 (T=9 mm)
Transverse weled joints PC34 (T=34 mm)

20
10

10

10

Number of cycles
Fig. 5. Test data and BEM simulations of transverse welded joints.

Table 2
Fatigue crack growth results of CHS-to-plate welded connections (nominal stress range = 70 MPa).
Increment

0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

C7P

C8P

C9P

DN

a (mm)

c (mm)

DN

a (mm)

c (mm)

DN

a (mm)

c (mm)

0
460732
655492
828399
986144
1119154
1234466
1339597
1429313

0
460732
194760
172907
157744
133010
115312
105131
89716

0.10
0.43
0.91
1.30
1.69
2.06
2.41
2.72
3.02

0.10
1.15
1.66
2.55
3.31
4.32
5.19
6.19
7.19

0
491896
705817
903789
1075585
1225766
1350140
1454838
1552251

0
491896
213921
197972
171796
150181
124373
104698
97414

0.10
0.37
0.77
1.07
1.40
1.71
1.97
2.21
2.48

0.10
0.94
1.34
2.03
2.73
3.49
4.17
4.95
5.73

0
515209
752575
960106
1133822
1296476
1434193
1552160
1661794

0
515209
237366
207531
173716
162654
137717
117968
109634

0.10
0.30
0.60
0.86
1.10
1.33
1.55
1.77
1.99

0.10
0.75
1.06
1.63
2.12
2.73
3.24
3.87
4.45

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T. Chen et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 98 (2013) 4451

Stress intensity factor (MPa mm1/2)

250
Keff

200
KI

150
100
0

50

KII

Normalized crack front

0
5th increment (a=1.33 mm, c=2.73mm)

KIII

-50
0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

Normalized crack front

Fig. 6. SIFs along the crack fronts for C9P (nominal stress range = 70 MPa).

t
5th
inncreemennt
a=1.3
33 m
mm
m, c=
=2.773 mm

8th inncreemen
nt
aa=1.99 m
mm
m, c=
=4.445 mm

Fig. 7. Fracture modes of specimen C9P (nominal stress range = 70 MPa).

400
Mean

Norminal stress range (MPa)

300
200

100
Mean-2S

C9P

80
60
40

20 4
10

C7P

C8P

CHS-to-plate welded connections C7P (t=3.2 mm)

CHS-to-plate welded connections C8P (t=2.6 mm)
CHS-to-plate welded connections C9P (t=2.0 mm)
5

10

10

10

Number of Cycles
Fig. 8. Test data and BEM simulations of CHS-to-plate welded connections.

With illustrations of simulated crack patterns for specimen C9P in Fig. 7, it was observed that the surface crack propagated with the number of fatigue cycles. The crack patterns are in good agreement with the results of the experimental study
[17]. It nearly penetrated through the thickness at the last step.
The results obtained with the aforementioned procedure have been compared with fatigue test data as graphed in Fig. 8.
Due to the unavailability of through-thickness fatigue lives for the three series of specimens, the estimated fatigue lives were

T. Chen et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 98 (2013) 4451

51

compared with the nal fatigue lives. The nal fatigue live was dened as the number of cycles when the crack propagated to
a length equal to half of the circumference of the tube during the fatigue experiments [16,17].
It was observed that the fatigue test data points were mostly above the predicted SN curves. This is reasonable since the
predicted fatigue lives were obtained with the surface crack model. The model cannot obtain the further crack propagation
life after penetration of the tube thickness. The other reason is that conservative material constants were used in Paris law.
Comparison with the tting curves of the fatigue test data obtained with the least squares method shows that the predicted
SN curves are located between the mean curve and the mean-2s (mean-2 standard deviation) curve of the test data. It was
also shown by the simulation that the increase of tube wall thickness resulted in fatigue strength decrease. This is in agreement with the previous researches [2,25]. The conclusion is that fatigue assessment on the crack propagation life of this
welded connection can be determined by using the boundary element method.
5. Conclusions
In this paper, the boundary element method was employed to analyze the fatigue crack growth lives of welded connections under bending. Paris law and strain energy density criterion were adopted during analysis. Thereafter, crack patterns
and fatigue crack growth life were calculated and compared with available experimental results.
The fatigue crack growth simulations of transverse llet welded joints under bending revealed that the surface crack at
weld toe propagated faster in the surface direction than in the thickness direction. The aspect ratio decreased as the crack
developed. The assumption of constant aspect ratio is not valid for the transverse llet welded joints under bending. CHSto-plate welded connections under in plane bending were also analyzed with 3D BEM models. The estimated SN curves
were between the mean curve and the mean-2s curve obtained from fatigue test data. The numerical results also reect
the thickness effect.
Acknowledgments
This project was supported by ARC Discovery Project, Australia and Kwang-Hua Fund for College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University. The rst author was partially supported by the China Scholarship Council during his visiting to the Department of Civil Engineering, Monash University, Australia.
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