Residual stress simulation of circumferential welded joints

Abstract

Residual stresses are an important consideration in the component integrity and life assessment of welded structure. The welding process is very complex time dependent physical phenomenon with material nonlinearity. The welding is a thermal process with convection between fluid flow and welding body, between welding body and environment. Next type of boundary conditions is radiation and thermo-mechanical contact on the outer surface of gas pipe in the near of weld. The temperature variation so obtained is utilised to find the distribution of the stress field. In this paper, a brief review of weld simulation and residual stress modelling using the finite element method (FEM) by commercial software ANSYS is presented. Thermo-elastic-plastic formulations using a von Mises yield criterion with nonlinear kinematics hardening has been employed. Residual axial and hoop stresses obtained from the analysis have been shown. The commercial FEM code ANSYS was used for coupled thermalmechanical analysis.