Research on Inherent Strain Distribution in Welded Low-Alloy Components

Inherent strain FEM is a recently developed numerical technique to forecast welding residual deformations. It makes use of the concept of inherent strain distribution to effectively reduce the analysis of the very complex highly nonlinear welding process to an equivalent linear elastic FEA, thus the computational cost could be significantly reduced. In this paper, the inherent strain coefficients for the welding process of low-alloy high tensile strength steel Q345 have been derived by using both elastic-plastic finite element analyses and experimental studies of twelve bead-on-plate specimens. It has been found that the results from the two methods compare well. Using the inherent strain coefficients derived, an example application of the inherent strain FEM to a real life welding process has been demonstrated.