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Fatigue Testing and Estimation of Material Fatigue Parameters for Full-scale Welded Specimens with Details Typical of Miter Gates
Eick, Brian A; Brown, Anita; Fillmore, Travis; Nguyen, Hai; Spencer, Billie
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/127713
Description
- Title
- Fatigue Testing and Estimation of Material Fatigue Parameters for Full-scale Welded Specimens with Details Typical of Miter Gates
- Author(s)
- Eick, Brian A
- Brown, Anita
- Fillmore, Travis
- Nguyen, Hai
- Spencer, Billie
- Issue Date
- 25-04-10
- Keyword(s)
- Miter gates
- fatigue
- welds
- full-scale testing
- Paris’ Law
- S-N Curve
- Date of Ingest
- 2025-04-10T12:27:47-05:00
- Abstract
- Inland waterways are economically critical transportation networks that facilitate the transportation of billions of dollars of goods annually. In their natural state, inland waterways such as rivers typically lack the depth of water to facilitate commercial transportation, a problem that is overcome with the construction of locks and dams. Dams work to raise the depth of water necessary for commercial traffic, while locks all vessels to traverse the dams. Miter gates are common components to river locks, and work as the door to the lock chamber and as the damming surface allowing water levels to change in the lock chamber as needed. Each time the lock passes vessels, miter gates experience loading cycles due to swinging of the gates and changing hydrostatic loads caused by raising and lowering of the water levels in the lock chamber. The cyclic nature of these loads makes these structures susceptible to accumulated fatigue damage. Fatigue life of a component, meaning the number of load cycles that can be experienced prior to crack initiation and failure, is very uncertain and dependent on characteristics such as material properties, geometry, fabrication quality, and environmental conditions. For weldments, there is greater uncertainty in fabrication quality, with potentially higher likelihood of flaws being introduced that act as stress risers and fatigue crack initiators. Modern miter gates are typically all-welded structures, and comprised of hundreds of steel plates welded together. Many miter gate welds are often installed in the field, where quality and environmental control is much more challenging. Fatigue behavior of welds is often specific to the detail of the weld. For the unique weld details used on miter gates, there is a lack of information in the literature regarding expected fatigue behavior. Currently, engineers working with miter gates use fatigue behavior information of marginally similar weld details found in existing codes. To overcome this issue, the researchers herein performed constant-amplitude cyclic load testing of specimens that represent the most common weld-detail found on miter gates. In order to accurately capture the residual stresses in the heat-affected zones of the weld and assess the potential for and effect of flaws due to the many welds in the detail, the specimens needed to be full-scale. Twelve such specimens were fabricated and tested to failure. A speckle pattern was applied to each specimen to allow for digital image correlation (DIC) to both identify when a crack has formed and then track the crack growth through successive cycles. The goal is to estimate SN curve and Paris’ Law parameters specific to this weld detail; however, analytical estimation of stress intensity factors (SIF) needed for Paris’ Law is infeasible for the complicated geometry of the specimen. Additionally, sufficient resolution could not be obtained to use DIC-based SIF estimation approaches. Accordingly, a numerical model of the specimen was created to estimate the SIFs. Linear regression is used to probabilistically describe the SN curve and Paris’ Law material coefficients, and results are compared to existing code-based approaches as well as similar studies. Results suggest that the tested weld detail is likely to have a longer fatigue life than would be expected using the code-based approach; however, cracks appear to propagate more rapidly than seen in other similar studies. Ultimately, the results of this study are expected to aid in fatigue analyses of miter gates and enable more robust designs.
- Type of Resource
- text
- Genre of Resource
- technical report
- Language
- eng
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Newmark Structural Laboratory Report Series (NSEL Report Series ISSN 1940-9826) PRIMARY
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