Reliability of Welded Structures Containing Cracks in Heat-Affected Zones

Abstract

This study investigates the reliability of a plate containing a semi-elliptical surface crack intersecting regions of dissimilar material properties. A weakest-link model is developed to express fracture toughness distributions in terms of effective crack lengths that account for the varying stress intensity factor along the crack front. The model is intended to aid in the development of fracture toughness distributions for cracks encountering local brittle zones (LBZ) in the heat-affected zones (HAZ) of welded joints, where lower-bound fracture toughness values have been measured in the laboratory when a significant portion of the crack front is intersecting the coarse-grained LBZs. An example reliability analysis is presented for a surface crack in a material containing alternating bands of two Weibull-distributed toughnesses. [S0892-7219(00)01203-6]