An application of the hot spot stress approach to a complex structural detail

Nowadays, the hot spot stress approach is becoming a widespread and quite useful method for fatigue strength estimates of welded structures and it has already been applied to plated structures successfully. The aim of this paper is to review the application of the hot spot stress approach to a quite complex welded joint widely used in ship structures, both for new buildings and for repairs, in order to check the method capabilities for this challenging test case. The study has been carried out basically following the guidelines issued by the International Institute of Welding, even if suggestions from papers found in open literature were taken into account as well as advice from experimental tests. The different applications of the approach reveal some scatter of the results, both in terms of stress concentration factors and, consequently, of fatigue lives