WholeLife delivers a more accurate determination of weld lives particularly for complex geometries by using an integrated approach for modeling fatigue over the entire lifetime of a component - from the very early stages to final fracture.
WholeLife
The same structural stress technique used for seam welds is used in WholeLife to determine the structural bending and membrane stresses at the weld. WholeLife uses the through thickness stress distribution for the geometry and can include the effect of a known residual stress profile. Although this is primarily a CAE based analysis, the same method may also be applied to measured stress data.