Residual Stress Evaluation in Butt Welded Joint of ASTM A36 Steel Plates

In this work thermo-mechanical 3D finite element analysis has been performed to assess the residual stresses in the butt-weld joints of ASTM A36 steel plates utilizing the commercial software package ANSYS. The finite element model is employed to evaluate transient temperature distribution and the residual stress fields during welding. The welding simulation was considered as a sequentially coupled thermo mechanical analysis. To make use of the advantage of geometrical symmetry, only one plate is considered for analysis. Temperature dependant properties of the material are specified. The spherical volume-specific density heat source distribution is considered with a radius b r . Convective and radiative heat losses are taken into account through boundary conditions for the outward flux. The residual stress distribution and magnitude in all directions and equivalent stress are obtained. The present 3D analysis results are found to be in good agreement with experimental results and existing 2D finite element analysis