Effect of the mean stress on the fatigue behaviour of single lap joints

Steel is the most important construction material for the mass production of engineered structures, especially in the transport industry. On the other hand, adhesive joints are typically used to join load-bearing components. Therefore, this work intends to investigate the stress ratio effects on the fatigue behaviour of adhesively bonded steel lap joints. S-N diagrams of fatigue tests, under constant amplitude loading, were obtained for stress ratios ranging between 0.05 and 0.7. It was observed that the fatigue life of the adhesive joints has very little dependence on the stress amplitude, indicating that only the maximum stress is important. The combination of a linear equation with a quadratic equation seems to be the best formulation to fit the experimental results. Finally, the Palmgren-Miner's Law is accurate enough to predict the fatigue design for sequential block loadings.