STUDY ON THE EFFECT OF RESIDUAL STRESS ON THE EXTERNALLY LOADED WELDED STRUCTURE

In the field of welding the behavior of a welded structure under consideration may be predicted via heat transfer and residual stress analysis. In order to facilitate the industrial applications of welding, numerical modeling of heat transfer and residual stress in weldment has been carried out applying Finite Element Method (FEM) and the analysis with the external load including this residual stress due to welding has been done. The present work includes the specialized finite element codes for the calculation of nonlinear heat transfer details and residual stress redistributed along with the external load in the welded structures. A basic interface, which allows models, built in commercial preprocessing package access to the data necessary to build standard input decks for these specialized FEM codes, which are not supported by commercial package. The results from the FEM codes are imported back into commercial package for visualization. In addition the residual stress values are exported to commercial package (such as ANSYS, PATRAN etc.) for further analysis with the external loads, which make the FEM codes fully applicable to the industrial purpose.