An Initiative Plan of the Equivalent Model for Simulation of the Welding Process

Many researchers content themselves with the 2D simulation of welding process instead of the 3D simulation, because of the time and the cost factors of the latter. In this research, the number of elements and nodes are reduced by an initiative plan (defining an equivalent model) for the simulation of welding. The welding process has been simulated by an uncoupled thermal-mechanical finite element model in three steps. Thermal history was determined from thermal analysis, and then the distribution of the metallurgical phase on the fusion and heat affected zones were calculated by a certain code. Afterward, the stress distribution was computed from mechanical analysis, where the material property was defined element by element according to the second step. One of the most important objectives of this simulation is to study the residual stresses of welding. Comparisons between the thermal analysis results and the metallographic and laboratory results of this research show acceptable accuracy of the proposed method.