Since welding is a transient and highly nonlinear mechanical problem, large computational time is required to solve by the finite element method. To improve the speed of computation, the authors developed an iterative substructure method which takes advantage of the characteristics of the welding problem. Noting the fact that the region which exhibits strong nonlinearity is limited in a very small area compared to the size of the model to be analyzed and the remaining part is linear, the problem is transformed into the combination of a large linear problem and a small but moving nonlinear problem. The continuity on the boundary between the linear and the nonlinear regions are maintained through iterative procedure. The effectiveness of the proposed iterative substructure method is demonstrated through a numerical example.
