Abstract
The present study deals with the influence of residual stresses induced by the buried-arc welding on the crack behavior in two butt-welded 20 mm thick plates. The following steps were undertaken: the thermo-mechanical simulation of the welding process, the mapping of stress results from a finite element (FE) mesh used for the welding simulation to a new FE mesh with a crack, the stress balancing, and the stress intensity factor (SIF) calculation. The FE and weight function (WF) methods were used to investigate the SIFs at the deepest point of semi-elliptical surface cracks with different geometries, orientations, and positions in relation to the weld line. In the case of cracks perpendicular to the weld line, the FE and WF results showed a good agreement for smaller cracks, while deviation between the results increases with the size of the crack. Considering the SIF solutions for the cracks of arbitrary orientation, it was observed that for some cases, the SIF value for mode III of crack opening can be of significant influence.
Highlights
The joining of structural components in many industries is usually done by cheap, very reliable, and productive welding technology
To calculate the crack growth, it is necessary to know the stress intensity factor (SIF), which for simpler cases can be obtained from industrial codes (API 579-1, BS 7910, ASME FFS-1, etc.) as an analytical solution based on the influence coefficients
For structures of more complex geometry, SIFs are calculated entirely by numerical procedures, where it is necessary to perform a numerical welding simulation in advance in order to obtain the distribution of residual stresses over the entire welded structure
Summary
The joining of structural components in many industries is usually done by cheap, very reliable, and productive welding technology. [22,23,24], the authors of this contribution had studied the distributions of temperature field during the buried-arc welding process, as well as the resulting residual deformation and stresses, in the plates joined by butt or tee welds and in plates containing circular patch samples. This contribution is a natural continuation of the mentioned previous research, and its goal is to investigate the influence of residual stresses produced by the buried-arc welding on the crack behavior in the butt-welded thick plates For this purpose, in this preliminary step, the variation of the SIF values is investigated, depending on the geometry, orientation, and position of the crack in relation to the weld line.
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