On the strength of stainless steel fillet welds

This paper describes 24 tests performed on welded specimens made of 3 stainless steel grades: EN 1.4307 (304 L) and EN 1.4404 (316 L) austenitic grades and EN 1.4062 duplex grade. For each grade, tests were carried out parallel to the weld and along the transverse direction. The austenitic grades were welded using GMAW (MAG), while the duplex grades were welded using Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) and Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW or TIG). After failure, the fracture surfaces were measured using Digital Image Correlation (DIC) and compared to measurements before testing. The results were compared to 70 experiments on welded stainless steel samples, gathered from the literature. A relatively high scatter was found among the different sources as well as differences between grades and loading directions. A reliability study was then performed in agreement with EN 1990:2002 Annex D on the complete experimental data pool and recommendations for the correlation factor βw are then provided