The Effect of Welding-Pass Grouping on the Prediction Accuracy of Residual Stress in Multipass Butt Welding

Abstract EN

The residual stress analysis of a thick welded structure requires a lot of time and computer memory, which are different from those in thin welded structure analysis.

This study investigated the effect of residual stress due to welding-pass grouping as a way to reduce the analysis time in multipass thick butt welding joint.

For this purpose, the parametric analysis which changes the number of grouping passes was conducted in the multipass butt weld of a structure with a thickness of 25 mm and 70 mm.

In addition, the residual stress by thermal elastoplastic FE analysis is compared with the results by the neutron diffraction method for verifying the reliability of the FE analysis.

The welding sequence is considered in order to predict the residual stress more accurately when using welding-pass grouping method.

The results of the welding-pass grouping model and half model occurred between the results of the left/right of the full model.

If the total number of welding-pass grouping is less than half of that of welding pass, a large difference with real residual stress is found.

Therefore, the total number of the welding-pass grouping should not be reduced to more than half.