| Welding, as a joining method in fabrication of engineering products and structural elements, has a direct influence on thermo-mechanical behavior of components in numerous structural applications. Since these thermo-mechanical behaviors have a major role in the life of welding components, predicting thermo-mechanical effects of welding is a major factor in designing of welding components. One of the major of these effects is generation of residual stresses due to welding. These residual stresses are not the causes of failure in the components solely, but they will add to external loads and stresses in operating time. Since, experimental methods are time consuming and expensive, computational simulation of welding process is an effective method to calculate these residual stresses. This investigation focuses on the evaluation of residual stresses and distortions due to circumferential girth welding of austenitic stainless steel pipes using the commercial finite element software ESI Visual-Environment and SYSWELD® to simulate welding process. Of particular importance is the comparison of results from three different types of mechanics models: 1) Axisymmetric, 2) Shell, and 3) Full 3-D. |
