PSI - Issue 19

Théophane Vanlemmens et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 19 (2019) 610–616 Vanlemmens, Elbel, Meneghetti/ Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

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Fig. 6: Comparison from the lives between R1 concept and PSM

The second issue that was compared with these tests is the performance. A very big time gain in the preparation has been identified, especially with the example of the undercarriage. The welds are pretty complex for this part, which lead to huge meshing issues with R1 concept. The meshing according to the PSM was very fast. The gain in this case was estimated up to a factor 30.

4. Extension of the method for welds extremities

The PSM way of modelling the welds (no radius needed) allows us to focus on the weld extremities (starts and ends of the weld seams). These geometries are relatively complex to model with fictitious radius concepts. Fig . 7 shows an example suggested in a paper from 2012 from Kaffenberger et al. [6]. The results seem to be very promising in terms of precision but the complexity of the model makes it difficult to apply industrially. For this reason, the weld ends are currently only assessed with the nominal stress approach, but this approach is of course limited in terms of precision and does not allow any optimization.

Fig. 7: Idealized weld end geometry suggested in [6]

In order to make a first test of the PSM for weld ends, it was decided to model the two samples that are being used in a current project running at Cetim at the initiative of the professional commission for construction, mines and drilling equipment manufacturers, TPMF [5]. Fig. 8 shows the geometry of both samples used for this test. Sample 1 is an example where the weld ends are not load carrying whereas sample 2 is an example of load carrying weld ends.