Experimental Analysis of Fatigue Life for Spot Welded Joints With Different Arrangement

Mechanical Engineering

Spot welded joints are widely used to fasten metal sheets together. In the present study, the effects of spot weld arrangements in multi-spot welded joints on the fatigue behavior of the joints are studied. Three different four-spot welded joints are studied: one-row four-spot parallel to the loading direction, one-row four-spot perpendicular to the loading direction and two-row four-spot weld specimens. The experimental fatigue test results reveal that the differences between the fatigue lives of three spot welded types in the low cycle regime are more considerable than those in the high cycle regime. However, all kinds of spot weld specimens have similar fatigue strength when approaching a million cycles. A non- linear finite element analysis is performed to obtain the relative stress gradients, effective distances and notch strength reduction factors based on the volumetric approach. The work here shows that the volumetric approach does a very well in predicting the fatigue life of the multi-spot welded joints.

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