Influences of Dimension Factors on Residual Stress and Welding Distortion in SUS304 Stainless Steel Butt Joint

Abstract

The influence of dimension factors on welding residual stress and deformation in SUS304 butt-welded joint whose thickness of plate is 4 mm is investigated by means of both numerical simulation and experiment. Based on ABAQUS software, a computational approach with the consideration of moving heat source, materials nonlinearity and geometrical nonlinearity is developed to investigate welding temperature field, stress field and deformation in SUS304 butt joint. Meanwhile, hole-drilling method and portable three-coordinate measuring machine are employed to measure the residual stresses and out-of-plane distortion, respectively. The effectiveness of the developed computational approach based on large deformation theory is verified by the experiment. Based on the numerical simulation method, the influences of aspect ratio on residual stress and distortion in SUS304 butt joints are extensively examined. The simulation results show that both transverse residual stress and out-of-plane distortion increase with aspect ratio, whereas the aspect ratio has an insignificant effect on longitudinal residual stress. In addition, the influences of weld reinforcement on distortion in SUS304 butt joints is examined numerically. The computed results indicate that weld reinforcement has a significant effect on welding distortion. The deformation mode is convex-concave when the weld reinforcement is neglected, while the deformation mode is concave-convex when the weld reinforcement is taken into account.