Durability Asessment of Welded Structures Based on Welding Simulation with LS-DYNA

The importance of welding for modern structural engineering cannot be emphasized enough. Different techniques are currently applied in the industrial environment offering almost unlimited possibilities regarding manufacturability with high cost effectiveness. At the same time the requirements on welded structures are increasing and so the requirements on the design methods. This paper presents an advanced calculation method for fatigue assessment of welds based on the simulation of a welding process in LS-DYNA®, thermophysical material modeling and fracture mechanics. The proposed method considers the most important aspects for durability prediction of welds. Applying worst-case assumptions, fatigue limits derived by the weight function method can be used in the lifetime assessment of complex welded structures together with the critical plane approach in order to consider a multiaxial nonproportional loading.