Fitness‐for‐Service Design of Fillet Welded Joints

Although the quality of welding has improved over the past decades, welding discontinuities are still unavoidable. Welded structures are subjected to inspection codes established by different authorities or professional societies, but the basis of acceptance criteria for weld discontinuities in existing standards appears to be arbitrary and, sometimes, naive. In this paper, the philosophy of “fitness for service” will give a rational approach to new quality acceptance criteria for weldments on the basis of service requirements. A design methodology is developed to characterize the relative strength of the fillet joints containing discontinuities through the definition of “Equivalent Effective Weld Size” and “Design Load Reduction Factor.”