FATIGUE CHARACTERIZATION OF FABRICATED SHIP DETAILS FOR DESIGN.

Fatigue cracking has for many years been responsible for extensive and costly ship repair work. This investigation provides a simple fatigue design procedure that will help to minimize such cracking in future ships. The design procedure provides for (a) a large variety of ship details, (b) the basic fatigue resistance of these various welded details, (c) a reliability factor (factor of safety) that accounts for the many uncertainties that exist in the fatigue data, the predicted loading history and in the associated analyses and (d) the random nature of the loading history to which a ship may be subjected during its lifetime. Refs.