Prediction of welding distortion during assembly process of thin plate structures

Ships and automobiles are fabricated front thin plates. To assemble parts, welding is commonly employed. However, welding distortion in large thin-plate panel structure is usually cased by buckling due to the residual stress. In this study, an elastic finite element method for predicting the welding distortion of three-dimensional thin-plate structures with considering welding sequence was proposed. In this method, the inherent strain was employed to model the local shrinkage due to welding itself, and the interface element was introduced to simulate the assembly process. The proposed method was applied to study the influence of welding sequence on the buckling distortion of the large thin-plate panel structure during assembly.

Study on welding deformation of the side beam based on numerical simulation method

The welding deformation is a key factor affecting the production quality of the side beam of the subway bogie frame. A major issue is how to control the welding deformation during the manufacturing processes. Based on the ＂Local- Global＂ method, the thermal cycle and the stress of a local model extracted from the global side beam model were simulated. The simulated strain result was mapped into the global model as an initial load to simulate the welding assembly deformation. Then the deformation distribution of the side beam was obtained by elastic finite element method, and compared with the measurement results. Furthermore, the welding deformation under different welding sequences and constraints was simulated. The influence of the welding sequences and constraints on the side beam deformation was analyzed. The results indicate that the deformation is the smallest when the sequence is symmetrical and decreases with the increase in constraints.

Multi-objective optimization of gas metal arc welding parameters and sequences for low-carbon steel (Q345D) T-joints

Q345D high-quality low-carbon steel has been extensively employed in structures with stringent weld- ing quality requirements. A multi-objective optimization of welding stress and deformation was presented to design reasonable values of gas metal arc welding parameters and sequences of Q345D T-joints. The optimized factors included continuous variables （welding current （I）, welding voltage （U） ahd welding speed （V）） and discrete variables （welding sequence （S） and welding direc- tion （D））. The concepts of the pointer and stack in Visual Basic （VB） and the interpolation method were introduced to optimize the variables. The optimization objectives included the different combina- tions of the angular distortion and transverse welding stress along the transverse and longitudinal dis- tributions. Based on the design of experiments （DOE） and the polynomial regression （PR） model, the finite element （FE） results of the T-joint were used to establish the mathematical models. The Pareto front and the compromise solutions were obtained by using a multi-objective particle swarm optimization （MOPSO） algorithm. The optimal results were validated by the corresponding results of the FE method, and the error between the FE results and the two-objective results as well as that be-tween the FE results and the three-objective optimization results were less than 17.2% and 21.5%, respectively. The influence and setting regularity of different factors were discussed according to the compromise solutions.