Issue 41

F. Berto et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 41 (2017) 260-268; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.41.35 265 on   at r = 0.4 mm and    finally the parameter a 6 has been obtained by a condition on   at r = 0.1 mm along the direction     . Stress components along the slit ligament as determined from the finite element model with t=1 mm and d/t=1 are shown in Fig. 2. The stress components are plotted along the direction  =0° over a distance less than or equal to 1.0 mm. The FE results are compared with Eqs (7a-c) along the slit bisector line considering the first seven parameters, from a 1 to a 7 , see Tab. 1. The plot of  rr along the direction  =180° is also documented as well as the theoretical stress fields limited Figure 1. Geometry of the welded lap joint to K I , K II and the T-stress, which are reported for comparison. The figure shows that the agreement between analytical frame and numerical results is satisfactory only by using of a multi-parameter stress field equation. It is important to note that the parameters a 5 and a 7 in Eq.( 8) for the radial stress component at  =180° were determined by involving parameters set in the other directions as explained above. In Fig. 3 the stress components are plotted along the direction  =90° where the only parameter set at  =90° is a 6 which is obtained by imposing a condition on   . The agreement between finite element results and theoretical stresses is very good also for the stress components not directly involved in the determination of the parameters a 4 , a 5 a 6 and a 7 . A slightly larger discrepancy between numerical and theoretical results is shown in Fig. 4 for the direction   90°. In this case the stress components present an intensity lower than in the other directions. The improvement introduced by considering the higher order terms with respect to the solution based on K I , K II and the T-stress is evident. d/t t= 1 a 1 MPa mm 0.5 a 2 MPa mm 0.5 a 3 MPa a 4 MPa mm -0.5 a 5 MPa mm -0.5 a 6 MPa mm -1 a 7 MPa mm -1 1  1.73  4.10 4.87  4.02  1.00 3.50 1.02 K I =4.35 K II =  10.28 T=19.5 Table 1 . Parameters of the stress field, overlap joints I NFLUENCE ON S TRAIN ENERGY DENSITY OF HIGHER ORDER TERMS he SED approach was later extended to thin welded lap joints (Lazzarin et al., 2009) considering two values of the control radius, R 0 = 0.15 and R 0 = 0.28 mm. Together with the SED values directly determined from the FE models, that paper documented also the SED values determined on the basis of the mode 1 and mode 2 NSIFs, K I and K II , the T-stress which plays an essential role in the case of thin welded joints. The deviation values K ,K ,T* FE FE I II Δ   ( ) / W W W , showed that for the sheet thickness t =5 mm, the maximum deviation with respect to the FE results was 3.6% for R 0 =0.15 mm and 3.1% for R 0 =0.28 mm (Lazzarin et al., 2009). When t = 1 mm, the deviation increased up to 25.0% for R 0 =0.28 mm and up to 9.6% for R 0 =0.15 mm (see Tab. 3). This means that in the presence of a sheet thickness t ≤ 1 mm and R 0 =0.28 mm, the SED depends not only K I , K II and T-stress but also on other nonsingular stress components. The averaged SED can be easily determined directly from the FE model. Alternatively, a complex expression based on Eq (6a-c), involving the first seven terms has been derived and reported herein for sake of brevity. A comparison between the SED from FE models and that obtained considering the parameters a 1 , a 2 , …a 7 already reported in Tab. 1, is shown in Tab. 2. The deviation values HOT FE FE Δ   ( ) / W W W is less than 3%. T t d t L > 100 d t=1 F t O F    r O   x y Slit  0 mm R 0