ABSTRACT
According to the present state of the art the fatigue strength of welded high strength steel connections is assumed to be the same as for welded standard steel connections. For an effective application of high strength steels in constructions subjected to repeated loading additional efforts are therefore necessary in order to improve the fatigue strength. This can be done for example by the application of post-weld treatment methods. However, up to the present it is not possible to apply the positive effects of such methods within the fatigue design standards for steel structures. Within this paper an experimental test program studying the effectiveness of the two post-weld treatment methods TIGdressing and Ultrasonic Impact Treatment (UIT) is presented. The test program comprises small scale fatigue tests on standard and high strength steel grades as well as full size girder fatigue tests.
2 APPLICATION OF HSS
