Predicting the Fatigue Life of Pristine and Pre-Corroded Friction Stir Welded Joints

Purpose – Friction stir welding (FSW) is simple, clean and cost effective joining technology which allows high‐quality joining of materials that have been traditionally troublesome to weld conventionally without distortion, cracks or voids such as high‐strength aluminium alloys. Since FSW has been identified as “key technology” for primary aerospace structures, the recent FAR regulations for damage tolerance and fatigue evaluations of aircraft structures require fatigue life predictions for this specific joint type also in the presence of corrosion. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the prediction of small coupon fatigue lives of thin section friction stir welded butt and T‐joints.Design/methodology/approach – Particularly, as a special application, widespread fracture mechanics software will be used to predict the fatigue life of FSW joints and to obtain SN curves. The engineering approach will start from an easy definition of the damage affecting the fatigue life of any of the previous...