The structural safety of connections with fillet welds

The need to use unsophisticated probability-based approaches and methods in the structural safety analysis of welded connections and joints subjected to extreme loads and other actions is discussed. A limit state criterion of the fillet weld, its normal and shear stresses caused by permanent, sustained and extraordinary variable actions are considered. Stochastic processes and sequences of safety margins of welded connections are analysed. The analysis of instantaneous and time-dependent survival probabilities of welded connections is based on the concepts of conventional resistances and transformed conditional probabilities. The structural safety of beam-to-column connections is analysed and illustrated by a numerical example.