A Robust Structural Stress Method for Fatigue Analysis of Offshore/Marine Structures

Recent rapid advances in developing mesh-insensitive structural stress methods are summarized in this paper. The new structural stress methods have been demonstrated to be effective in reliably calculating structural stresses that can be correlated with fatigue behavior from simple weld details to complex structures. As a result, a master S–N curve approach has been developed and validated by a large amount of weld S–N data in the literature. The applications of the present structural stress methods in a number of joint types in offshore/marine structures will be illustrated in this paper. The implications on future applications in drastically simplifying fatigue design and evaluation for offshore/marine structures will also be discussed, particularly for using very coarse finite element mesh designs in ship structures.