Fatigue Behaviour Study of Laser Hybrid Welded Eccentric Fillet Joints – Part Ii: State-of-the-art of Fracture Mechanics and Fatigue Analysis of Welded Joints

Simplified fatigue and fracture mechanics based assessment methods are widely used by the industry to determine the structural integrity significance of postulated cracks, manufacturing flaws, service-induced cracking or suspected degradation of engineering components under normal and abnormal service loads. In many cases, welded joints are the regions most likely to contain original fabrication defects or cracks initiating and growing during service operation. The welded joints are a major component that is often blamed for causing a structure failure or for being the point at which fatigue or fracture problems initiate and propagate. Various mathematical models/techniques for various classes of welded joints are developed by analytically or by simulation software’s that can be used in fatigue and fracture assessments. This literature survey compiled useful information on fracture and fatigue analysis of various welded joints. The present review is divided into two major sectionsfracture mechanics and fatigue analysis with widely used models. A survey table is also introduced to get the outlook of research trend on fatigue and fracture over last 3 decades. Although tremendous research effort has been implemented on fatigue and fracture analysis of conventional welding, research on relatively new welding technology (laser welding, hybrid laser welding) is still limited and unsatisfactory. In order to give guarantee or make welding standard for new welding technology, further research is required in the field of fatigue and fracture mechanics including FEM and multi-scale modeling.