A study on the effect of welding sequence on welding distortion in ship deck structure

In this paper, a numerical simulation based on finite element method is presented to study the effect of welding sequences on the magnitude and shape of distortion when welding several flat-bar stiffeners to a steel plate in ship deck structure. The simulation includes a three dimensional transient and nonlinear sequentially coupled thermal and mechanical analyses in ANSYS commercial code using an element birth and death technique to model the addition of welding metal to the specimen. A typical fillet-welded joint is studied and the simulation results are compared with experimental data for a gas metal arc welding process. The effect of eight welding sequences on the magnitude and shape of distortion in the plate on six lines is investigated. Finally, it is found the significant features of occurred distortion for various welding sequences in which not only the magnitudes but also the deformed shapes of the welding distortion are obviously different.