Fatigue life assessment of welded joints

Fatigue is one of the most common failure mechanisms of structural components. Many fatigue failures have become popular throughout engineering history since the tragic railroad accidents that motivated Wöhler to begin the first investigations of the fatigue damage process. Since then a huge deal of work has been carried out ot the subject by several generations of engineers leading to a deeper comprehension of the complex phenomena related to the damages occurring in structural components due to time varying loads. However, many aspects of the subject remains unclear and several questions are still open for discussion. The present work tries to give an answer to some of those questions. In particular, it is focused on the fatigue life assessment under multiaxial and variable amplitude loads with regard to the application to welded joint connections. Fatigue is a classical topic in engineering design and a subject of wide practical interest since it is one of the most common causes of failure for structural components.