The multiaxial fatigue critical plane method can be used to evaluate the extremely-low-cycle fatigue (ELCF) damage of beam-to-column welded joints in steel frameworks subjected to strong seismic activity. In this paper, fatigue damage models using structural detail parameters are studied. Firstly, the fatigue properties obtained from experiments are adopted to assess ELCF life for steel frameworks. In these experiments, two types of welded specimens, namely, plate butt weld (PB) and cruciform load-carrying groove weld (CLG), are designed according to the structural details of steel beam and box column joints, in which both structural details and welded factors are taken into account. Secondly, experiments are performed on three full-scale steel welded beam-to-column joints to determine the contribution of stress and/or strain to damage parameters. Finally, we introduce a modification of the most popular fatigue damage model of Fatemi and Socie (FS), modified by us in a previous study, for damage evaluation, and compare this with Shang and Wang (SW) in order to examine the applicability of the fatigue properties of PB and CLG. This study shows that the modified FS model using the fatigue properties of CLG can predict the crack initiation life and evaluate the damage of beam-to-column welded joints, and can be subsequently used for further investigation of the damage evolution law.
Keywords: constructional engineering; fatigue life prediction; multiaxial low-cycle fatigue; structural details; welded joint.