Project: Rapid Evaluation of Distortions in Welding Structures

The complex thermo-mechanical processes that occur during welding an assembly involve important volume changes that cause residual stresses and distortions in the final component, being their prediction prior to the production one of the most interesting challenges in these industrial applications. Welding simulation has been developed over the past years focused mainly on simple assemblies, even simulating the postweld heat treatments. Nevertheless, the computational time required to carry out the welding simulation of complex assemblies produced making use of many beads is too high, and not useful to define the optimum welding sequence in order to minimize the final distortion of the whole structure. The implementation of the shrinkage volume approach in the finite element code used in the simulation (ANSYS in our consortium) will decrease drastically the consuming time, about 80%, providing a useful tool to analyse several possible strategies of welding to minimize the distortion produced in the welded assembly.

Acronym	RED-WeldS
Duration	01/11/2013 - 30/10/2015
Project Topic	Knowledge-based engineering technologies (computer-aided engineering and design, automated manufacturing, product lifetime management, etc.)
Network	MANUNET II
Call	MANUNET Call 2013

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	Tuinsa Norte, S.A.	Coordinator	Spain
2	Lointek Ingeniería y Técnica del Montaje	Partner	Spain
3	Godhino Luz Engineering	Partner	Portugal