The design of metallic welded structures is mostly based on guidelines and rules, suggesting simplified procedures based on tests carried out on standard
structural details. Such S-N curves procedures are a practical tool for the evaluation of the fatigue strength of a ship structural detail. The basic
assumption of them is that the captioned detail has the same fatigue behavior of a class of standard details. The reference structural details presented by the guidelines are necessarily limited. From this point of view designers are implicitly driven to use mainly standard structural solutions.
A way to generalize fatigue strength assessment is the adoption of a local approach, which requires the determination of the stresses in way of the crack
starting location to be compared with their critical value at a given cycles number.
In this paper different finite element techniques have been used and compared in evaluating the stress concentration factors. A calibration of finite
element techniques is achieved involving knowledge of parameters sensitivity based on the experimental results of a typical ship structural detail tested in the Ship Structures Laboratory of DINAV.
