Experimental and numerical investigations on extremely-low-cycle fatigue fracture behavior of steel welded joints

• A continuum damage mechanics method is proposed to predict fracture due to earthquake.
• Six full-scale welded joints are tested under monotonic or inelastic cyclic loading.
• Crack initiation and growth behavior at the joints are investigated in the test.
• Fracture process of welded joints under monotonic or cycle loading is simulated.
• The method shows good accuracy in fracture prediction of the welded joints.

Beam-to-column welded joints in moment-resisting steel frames may undergo extremely low cycle fatigue in earthquake action. The aim of this paper is to investigate the fatigue failure behavior by means of experimental study and finite element analysis. Experiments were conducted on the six full scale beam-to-column welded joints. The seismic performance of welded joints with different weld access hole geometries was compared among them and the effect of crack initiation and growth on the load carrying capacity of welded joints was discussed. In addition, a continuum damage mechanics model used previously for monotonic loading was reformulated in order to account for the extremely low cycle loading condition. The model was implemented in a commercial nonlinear finite element software of ABAQUS, which was adopted to predict the fracture of beam-to-column welded joints subjected to monotonic loading and extremely low cycle loading. The predicted load displacement response agrees well with the test results. The distribution and evolution of damage in the welded joints were calculated during crack initiation and propagation. It is found that the methodology based on continuum damage mechanics proposed in the paper can successfully predict fracture behavior of beam-to-column welded joint with reasonable accuracy.