A study on port plug distortion caused by narrow gap combined GTAW & SMAW and Electron Beam Welding

A study of port plug distortion resulting from narrow gap combined GTAW & SMAW and Electron Beam Welding was carried out. Thermomechanical finite element analysis of port plug becomes virtually impossible because of the requirement of huge number of nodes and elements. Hence an analysis method based on the concept of inherent strain was used in this work. The computational time required was about 40–50 min only in a Core (TM) 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz computer with 2 GB RAM, which otherwise was not possible with other conventional computation techniques. As was expected the overall distortion due to EB welding was found to be less compared to that of narrow gap GTAW & SMAW.