Study of Welding Distortion and Residual Stress Considering Nonlinear Yield Stress Curves and Multi-constraint Equations

Inherent strain analysis has been successfully applied to predict welding deformations of large-scale structural components, while thermal-elastic-plastic finite element method is rarely used for its disadvantages of long calculation period and large storage space. In this paper, a hybrid model considering nonlinear yield stress curves and multi-constraint equations to thermal-elastic-plastic analysis is further proposed to predict welding distortions and residual stresses of large-scale structures. For welding T-joint structural steel S355JR by metal active gas welding, the published experiment results of temperature and displacement fields are applied to illustrate the credibility of the proposed integration model. By comparing numerical results of four different cases with the experiment results, it is verified that prediction precision of welding deformations and residual stresses is apparently improved considering the power-law hardening model, and computational time is also obviously shortened about 30.14% using multi-constraint equations. On the whole, the proposed hybrid method can be further used to precisely and efficiently predict welding deformations and residual stresses of large-scale structures.