Numerical simulation of temperature distribution and experimentation in laser beam welding of SS317L alloy

Abstract

In the present study stainless steel 317L grade was chosen for joining using 400w Nd-YAG laser beam welding process. Tensile strength and temperature distribution are considered as output responses while Welding current, Frequency, Pulse width are taken as process parameters. A butt configuration of 5 mm thick plate of austenitic steel alloy and K-type digital thermocouple was used to observe the temperature experimentally. The welded plates are cut using Electro-discharge machining to prepare Tensile test specimens according to ASTME21 standard. The specimens are tested to get stress-strain graphs and ultimate tensile strengths for all the 9 cases (as per L9 Orthogonal array). Additionally, a 2D transient thermal-structural numerical simulation model was developed to simulate the complete laser welding process. The effect of each parameter has been studied experimentally and numerically. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) has been used for finding out the contribution of each input factor on the output response with the help of MINITAB software. The optimised values of process parameters are utilised to get the thermal profiles and heat-affected zone using finite element simulations. The finite element calculation of process was carried out by a parametric design language APDL available in the ANSYS finite element code. The temperature values obtained using finite element simulation and experiments are matching reasonably good with an error of 12% hence the developed simulated model can be used to study related parameters.