Fatigue Strength Reduction Factors for Welded Joints: Another View

The paper distinguishes between FSRFs that are used for two different purposes. One is to serve as a guideline for an initial estimate of the fatigue strength of a welded joint. That is the purpose of the FSRFs that are given in the ASME B&PV Code and various accompanying documents. If that estimate renders the fatigue strength inadequate, an FSRF can be sought that is limited to the joint under consideration. The paper shows how such FSRFs can be determined from fatigue test data. In order to make it possible to read the allowable cycles from the same design fatigue curve as that used for the FSRFs of the guidelines, a Langer curve [defined by equation (2) in the paper] is used to curve fit the data. The appropriate FSRF is obtained by minimizing the standard deviation between this curve and the data. The procedure is illustrated for girth butt-welded pipes. The illustration shows that for the data used in the analysis, a constant FSRF is applicable to less than one million cycles but not to the high-cycle regime.