Shell–solid Coupling Analysis for Mechanical Behavior of Complex Thin-plate Weld Structure

抄録

Complex thin-plate structures such as ships and bridges are welded together with numerous thin plates and stiffeners. Thermal elastic-plastic analysis based on the finite element method is a fundamental tool for predicting welding deformations and residual stresses in large steel structures. The shell-solid coupling method can improve the analysis scale and efficiency compared to the solid element method. This study aims to introduce the shell-solid coupling analysis method into welding mechanical analyses to improve the efficiency of computation and modeling. The guideline for the use of the proposed method was also investigated. The proposed shell-solid coupled analysis was constructed based on a multipoint constraint technique which erases the degrees of freedom at the shell-solid interface. It was applied to the analysis of welding mechanics of the fundamental T-joint model to validate the accuracy of the proposed shell-solid coupling analysis. The proposed method was also applied to the welding deformation analysis of a panel structure model for a car-carrier ship. The results revealed that computing time of the proposed method was less than 30 percent of that of the conventional FEM and the proposed method has almost the same analysis accuracy as conventional techniques. The proposed method could achieve a more efficient analysis than the conventional method.