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The paper deals with the stress gradients close to the weld toe. The presented method describes completely the plane stress
field by means of two stress intensity factors due to the sharp open notch, quantifying separately the symmetric and
skew-symmetric stress distributions. In such a way it is formally revised a fatigue strength criterion based on the knowledge
of the complete stress field near the singularity, already proposed by Atzori and more recently by Verreman.