Fatigue Damage Evaluation of Friction Stir Spot Welded Cross-Tension Joints Under Repeated Two-Step Force Amplitudes

This paper investigates an approach to evaluate the fatigue damage of FSSW cross-tension specimens under two-step force amplitude conditions. In fatigue tests with repeated two-step force amplitude, the fatigue limit of the welded joint disappeared. However, the fatigue damage evaluation using the modified Miner’s rule erred too much on the side of safety, as the modified Miner’s rule tends to overestimate the damage by applied forces below the fatigue limit. Thus, it was determined that, within the testing conditions used in this study, the fatigue damage evaluation using Haibach’s method yielded an accurate evaluation. In the case where significant plastic deformation caused by the applied force occurred near the welded zone, the cumulative fatigue damage value based on Miner’s rule was often larger than unity. Therefore, it is important to consider a cumulative damage estimation that takes into account the effect of pre-strain from the high force amplitude.