By -
Date 09-15-2005 15:36
John,
My understanding is that the notch effect is much more injurious than the reduction in thickness, especially for joints transverse to the primary direction of tensile stress. My experience on fatigue sensitive offshore structures has been that in some cases, the Engineer (via the spec and drawings) requires the toes of welds to be ground such that the base material thickness is intentionally reduced (ref D1.1 C2.20.6.6 for a discussion of this).
This is normally accomplished with a pencil grinder using a bit with a radius based on the material thickness, and the grinding is normally to a depth of 2-3mm.
Mankenberg