A synthesis of data from steel spot welded joints of reduced thickness by means of local SED

In some previous works two fatigue scatterbands were given in terms of the local strain energy density (SED) for welded joints made of structural steel and aluminium alloy. The material-dependent radius R0 of the control volume was identified with reference to conventional arc welding processes. It resulted equal to 0.28 mm for welded joints made of structural steel tested under prevailing mode I, with fatigue failures both at the weld root and the weld toe. The scatterband did not include data from thin welded joints, the main plate thickness being greater than 6 mm. The SED approach is used here to summarise more than 400 fatigue data from steel spot welds in lap–shear joints, coach–peel specimens and cross–tension specimens of small thickness. Due to the typical crack initiation and propagation phases, an appropriate choice to summarise the data in a narrow scatterband seems to be the use of a toroidal control volume. The volume circumferentially encapsulates the slit tip along the weld spot nugget. The SED value at 2 million cycles is found to match that of the previous scatterband for welded joints of higher thicknesses.