FATIGUE ANALYSIS ON WELDMENTS – CASE STUDY ON EXCAVATOR BOOM

Abstract

Materials and their understanding are an important aspect that will help us to achieve great things, to manufacture, to build what is necessary to experience news wonder in our universe. But one of the big threats to all that is “fatigue” failure. Fatigue, which is the formations of cracks caused by continuous damage of materials subjected to cyclic loads, causes failure in structure especially on weldment structures, that why in this paper we are going to talk about fatigue failure in details, we are going to look at the causes for fatigue failure, its effects on the life of welded structures. Different methods for fatigue evaluation will be discuss and how to prevent early fracture cause by the stresses on different structures on sites. And a general characteristics of a typical construction machine excavator boom will be considered, on how the loads are applies on the machine to better understand the effect of fatigue failure. Finally, a case study only on the boom part of a HMK 490LC vehicle model will be evaluated, FAT codes were already determined and the measurement on the boom. Then the experimental method (strain gauge) will be used to collect the data require to evaluate and to predict the fatigue life thanks to the computer software, n-code design life.