A study on the influence of clamping on welding distortion

This paper presents numerical case studies on the influence of clamping on welding distortion. For the case studies a 1 mm DP600 overlap joint and a 6 mm S355 T-joint have been selected, and reference simulations have been performed. The results have been compared to experiments in a previous paper and show a good agreement. The influence of the clamping time, the release time and the influence of clamp preheating has been investigated for both geometries. Here, the effect of the clamping on buckling distortion as well as bending and angular distortion has been studied. It is shown that the final residual stresses and distortions depend strongly on the clamping conditions. Adaptive clamping may be helpful as an in-line technique for welding distortion mitigation by forcing the material to deform plastically.