Friction welding (FW) is a collection of a series of friction-based solid state joining processes which can produce high quality welds of different components with either similar or dissimilar materials and has been attracting increasing attention. Due to the extreme condition encountered during FW and the highly thermomechanical coupled nature of FW, finite element methods have been widely developed to study the FW process. In the light of reasonable simplification, we developed several effective methods based on the ABAQUS environment. Initially 2D models were developed to investigate the complete FW process, where an implicit method with remeshing and map solution techniques and an explicit method with the Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) adaptive mesh controls were proposed to effectively overcome the excessive element distortion by using the ABAQUS Standard and Explicit packages, respectively. In addition, a 3D model was also developed to obtain better simulation results with the help of the ALE adaptive mesh controls in the ABAQUS/Explicit package and the map solution technique in the ABAQUS/Standard package combined with the HYPERWORKS software. The experiments validate the feasibility and accuracy of the developed models.