Fatigue assessment of a marine structural steel and comparison with Thermographic Method and Static Thermographic Method

Fatigue properties are of fundamental importance and extremely time consum-ing to be assessed. The aim of this research activity is to apply the Thermo-graphic Method (TM) and the Static Thermographic Method (STM) duringfatigue and tensile tests to correlate the temperature trend to the fatigue proper-ties of an S355 steel. The material was retrieved from an in‐service port crane.Traditional fatigue tests were performed in order to evaluate the S‐N curve witha scatter band. Step load tests were carried out deriving the fatigue limit and theEnergy Parameter of the material. Static tensile tests were performed to obtainthe stress at which the temperature trend deviates from the thermoelastic behav-ior. The fatigue properties obtained by means of the energetic methods werecompared to the traditional ones showing a good agreement.