  Corrosion fatigue is a major threat to the integrity of marine structures.
However, the combined damaging effect of corrosion and fatigue is not well
understood due to the uncertainties associated with the stochastic nature of
pitting corrosion. A pitting corrosion defect could have a quite complex
morphology that varies randomly from one case to another. Nevertheless, in
numerical corrosion fatigue studies, the complex pit morphology is often
idealized using an overly simplified geometry with a smooth surface because of
the diffi-culties involved in modelling defects with the irregular and random
shapes of pitting corrosion. The present study investigates the influence of
such geometrical simplifications on the results of numerical corrosion fatigue
analyses. For this purpose, an isolated complex-shaped pit, generated using a
hierarchical stochastic algorithm scripted in Python and linked with
Abaqus/CAE, is developed in a Q235 steel dog-bone specimen. The numer-ical
results obtained from this model are compared with those from another model
containing an idealized counterpart of the irregular pit. A discussion on the
effect of pit morphology on the stress/strain history and distribution and
fatigue crack initiation is presented.
