On a Procedure for Fatigue Life Prediction of Spot Welded Structure

A procedure to evaluate the fatigue life of multi-spot welded structures is discussed. The procedure allows to increase the accuracy of the results considerably, even keeping the number of degrees of freedom involved in the spot region low. The procedure makes use of an assemblage of mono dimensional elements to form a spot weld element. After the implementation of the procedure in an automatic form, some results are discussed in the paper for various joints