Numerical and experimental study of mitigation of welding distortion

Welding stresses and deformations are closely related phenomena. During the heating and cooling cycles thermal strains may occur in the weld and adjacent area. The strains produced during the heating stage of welding are always accompanied by plastic deformation of the metal. The stresses resulting from these strains combine and react to produce internal forces that cause a variety of welding distortions. Welding deformation needs to be minimized and also the designer should know before hand the extent of deformation so that it can be accounted for in the design as well as in the construction stages. In this paper, heat sinking as a method of distortion mitigation has been studied. Heat sinking has been affected by circulating water through channel clamped at the bottom surface of the plates undergoing welding. The pseudolinear equivalent constant rigidity concept has been used in this investigation for thermo-mechanical analysis of plates undergoing welding with simultaneous heat sinking. The initial nonlinear problem with varying modulus dependent on temperature is transformed into a pseudolinear equivalent system of constant rigidity that is solved by linear analysis. The numerical results compared very well with those of the experimental ones. The proposed concept is found to be computationally more efficient and simpler to model compared to FEM for solving similar thermo-elasto-plastic nonlinear problems. The procedure presented in this work and the results thus obtained, holds a great promise for determining the heat sinking parameters for effectively controlling welding distortion. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.