A basic procedure for the integrity assessment of structural steels containing notches

This paper presents a basic procedure for the integrity assessment of structural steels containing notches. It is based on the work developed by the authors in the last five years analyzing the notch effect in structural steels, with the Theory of Critical Distances as the main theoretical framework. The procedure combines the notch effect corrections provided by this theory with a basic Failure Assessment Diagram, and has been successfully validated through its application to 394 fracture tests performed on 4 different steels working at different temperatures.