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Introduction
Construction machinery is widely used in construction engineering because of its characteristics of high productivity and low cost. A concrete pump truck is one type of construction machinery that is used to pump concrete to a desired location.1 The main components of the concrete pump truck are typically welded box girder structure. Generally, welding causes local stress concentrations and other types of defects. These welded components subjected to fluctuating loads may experience serious fatigue failure and catastrophic results. To avoid the premature fatigue failure of these welded components, a fatigue assessment should be performed to ensure that these welded components resist fatigue failure for a predicted service life.
Principal factors affecting the fatigue life of welded components are the range of stress that the component is expected to experience and the number of cycles. Caglayan et al.2 presented fatigue results for welded crane runway girders. Finite element (FE) and quasi-static load tests were conducted to acquire the load spectrum of crane runway girders. The remaining fatigue life of the crane runway girders was evaluated based on the AASHTO specification. Wang et al.3 presented a fatigue assessment of fixed offshore platforms. Li et al.4 proposed a new fatigue life analysis method based on six-sigma robust optimization to optimize the weight of collector head support. The reason for fatigue failure of a rear axle housing prototype that is used in the heavy commercial vehicles was investigated by Topaç et al.5 Detailed finite element analyses (FEA) were performed to estimate the stress distributions for the stress concentration regions. The fatigue analysis were performed using an estimated S–N curve for the housing material. A practical solution of redesigning the banjo transition area and increasing the thickness of the reinforcement ring has been proposed to increase the fatigue life. The fatigue life of a railway rail subjected to welding residual and contact stresses was presented by Lee et al.6 The FE method was used to predict the residual stress. The contact stress when a wheel rolled over a weld was calculated based on the elastic elliptical contact model. Then, the fatigue damage was evaluated by combining with the residual stress and contact stress. Yin et al.7,8 presented research work for assessing...