Abstract
This study predicts the behavior of welded plate panels (unstiffened plates) with different geometrical properties (slenderness ratio and aspect ratio) in order to address a rational structural design procedure, as these parameters are of great importance from a structural design perspective. Nonlinear finite element analysis has been used to simulate the butt-welding process of plate panels, giving the three-dimensional distribution of distortion and residual stresses induced by welding through the design of a moving heat source. The numerical results are validated with published experimental measurements. The effect of geometrical properties such as slenderness ratio β and aspect ratio a/b on the creation of welding-induced imperfections (distortion and residual stresses) have been investigated in this work. These geometrical properties influence the creation of the welding-induced imperfections, which in turn affect the load-carrying capacity of the plate panels. Three different plate slenderness ratios with three different aspect ratios have been studied. It is concluded that increasing the plate aspect ratio can highly increase the out-of-plane distortion magnitude as well as the compressive residual stress. The plates with high slenderness ratio (thin thicknesses) are highly affected by increasing plate aspect ratio a/b. As the slenderness ratio β increases, the reduction in the ultimate strength due to the existence of welding-induced imperfections highly decreases. Slenderness ratio β can highly affected the ultimate strength of plates with smaller aspect ratio more than plates with higher aspect ratio.
Highlights
Welding technology is one of the most important manufacturing operations for a wide range of applications, especially for the shipbuilding industry, because of its high productivity
The results showed that mechanical boundary conditions mainly affect the welding deformation and have little influence on the residual stress
This study considers the influence of weldinginduced imperfections
Summary
Welding technology is one of the most important manufacturing operations for a wide range of applications, especially for the shipbuilding industry, because of its high productivity. During the heating and cooling process, the expansion and contraction of the weld metal and adjacent base metal result in imperfections such as distortions and welding-induced residual stress. Several researchers have used the three-dimensional finite element technique to predict thermal history, welding-induced residual stresses and out-of-plane distortion, validating it with experimental measurements. Because of these imperfections, the specified structural members may not attain their design load that is supposed to be carried and will require extra man-hours to remove these imperfections. Control of these imperfections and their impact on the structure’s ultimate load-carrying capacity of a plate panel are investigated in the present study
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