Acoustic Emission Assessment of Fatigue Crack Growth from a Transverse Weld Toe
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 28, Issue 2
Abstract
Acoustic emission (AE) has been increasingly used for assessment and prediction of fatigue cracks in steel bridge members. Fatigue cracks develop at the transverse weld toe of stiffeners, attachments, and cover plates in steel bridge members. Effectiveness of AE to assess fatigue crack initiation from weld toe is investigated in this study, and an attempt is made to predict the crack growth behavior using AE signal features. Cruciform specimens consisting of a single tension pull plate with transverse fillet-welded plates attached at midspan are tested in this study. The transverse plates represent stiffeners and/or short attachments typical of welded steel bridge details. The specimen provides realistic initial conditions of fatigue crack initiation and growth from high stress concentration regions. Consequently, AE waveform characteristics representative of those expected on bridge structures are produced. Accurate stress intensity factor values are difficult to obtain because of the small, nonuniform crack growth conditions at the weld toe. Finite-element method analysis for welded geometries capturing stress fields at the weld toe of stiffener details is performed, and numerical results are incorporated into an existing analytical stress intensity factor framework. Procedures for assessing the crack size and predicting remaining fatigue life of the specimen using absolute energy feature of AE signals are demonstrated.
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Acknowledgments
This work was performed under the support of the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Technology Innovation Program, Cooperative Agreement Number 70NANB9H9007.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 28 • Issue 2 • February 2016
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 27, 2014
Accepted: Mar 20, 2015
Published online: Jul 13, 2015
Discussion open until: Dec 13, 2015
Published in print: Feb 1, 2016
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