Fatigue Assessment of Aged Steel Specimens Under Uniaxial Cyclic Loading

Corrosion degrades mechanical properties and fatigue life of structures considerably; hence reliable numerical fatigue analysis is essential for assessing the remaining life of aged steel structures. In this paper, the influence of corrosion topology and the minimum thickness location on the stress concentration over corroded specimens and, in consequence, their fatigue life was comprehensively studied. The corroded surfaces were modelled using random spatial distributions approach. The results of the numerical simulation have been compared with published fatigue test results. The comparison showed good agreement between the experimental results and the adopted approaches for fatigue life assessment.