Abstract
Welding is widely used for assembling steel structures such as ships and bridges. Quantitative prediction and effective control are required to minimize residual stress and welding distortion. Heat conduction Finite Element (FE) analysis and thermal elastic plastic FE analysis are generally used in welding simulations. However, these analyses have very large computing time and memory consumption that are proportional to the second or third power of the number of degrees of freedom of the analysis model. To accomplish smaller computing time and memory consumption for thermal elastic plastic analysis, we have developed Idealized explicit Finite Element Method (FEM). In this study, Idealized explicit FEM for heat conduction analysis is developed and applied to series of computations for bead-on-plate welding and tandem fillet welding of a large-scale stiffened plate. As a result, it is found that Idealized explicit FEM can reduce the computing time and memory consumption of heat conduction analysis especially for large-scale problems.
