Finite Element Analysis of Arc-Welding Process by Parallel Computation

Abstract

2) introduced the method for the analysis of welding processes. The subjects of the FEA (finite element analysis) of arcwelding processes may be categorized into two in general. The first is on the modeling of welding process itself, and it has been already established regarding how to model heat input, what constitutive equation to use, and how to simulate the filling of filler material, etc. The other is on the numerical analysis and the associated techniques for the fast solution of the threedimensional FEA for welding process, for the three-dimensional FEA of welding process requires an enormously great deal of computing time and computer memory. Three-dimensional FEA of welding process, which particularly includes heat transfer, metallurgical phase transformation and transformation plasticity, needs a huge amount of computation time and, then it limits practical applications of the method for industrial welding problems. Application of parallel computation is a general alternative to reduce the computation time without any loss of accuracy of the results. In this paper, we explore on the effectiveness of the application of parallel computation for arc welding problems. The outline of the paper is as follows. Firstly, a brief review of finite element formulation for arc-welding process is given in Section 2, and the implementation of a parallel frontal solver developed for FEA of arc-welding process is given in Section 3. In Section 4, a numerical test for butt-welding process is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of parallel computation.