Abstract
Thermal elastic plastic (TEP) finite element analysis (FEA) is widely used to analyze welding mechanical phenomena such as welding deformation and residual stress. One of the problems of welding mechanical analysis using finite element method (FEM) is that it requires a lot of time for preprocessing such as modeling and meshing. In this study, the explicit master-slave elimination with multipoint constraints (MPCs) was introduced to the Idealized explicit FEM (IEFEM) for efficient FE modeling and welding mechanical analysis of large-scale complex structures. The proposed method was applied to T-joint welds to verify its accuracy when using the explicit master-slave elimination, and the effects of the ratio of master and slave element sizes on results of the heat conduction (HC) analysis and TEP analysis were investigated. As a result, it was confirmed that the welding mechanical analysis using the proposed method is in good agreement with the analysis results using the ordinary node-shared model. It was also confirmed that the analysis results did not agree when the element size of the slave was large compared to the element size of the master. Finally, the proposed method was also applied to the analysis of a welded structure including multi-layer welds and fillet welds for steel column-beam connections. It was confirmed that the proposed method was useful in performing fast calculations with highly efficient FE modeling for large-scale steel column-beam joint welds.
