Element Simulation of Welding Residual Stresses and Distortion in 5083 Incorporating Metallurgical Phase Transformation

The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of metallurgical phase transformation on welding residual stress induced by MIG(metal inert-gas welding) butt-welding in 5083. In the numerical simulations, two separate finite element models are studied. The first one describes a sequentially coupled thermal, mechanical model based on a FE(finite element) analysis software Abaqus, while the second one discusses a sequentially coupled thermal, metallurgical, mechanical model based on another software Sysweld. In the thermo-matallomechanical model, the dependency of yield stress upon temperature and phase fraction is taken into account. A comparative analysis of experimentally validated finite element models has been performed and the residual stress states with and without the metallurgical phase transformation are predicted. The results reveal that the inclusion of metallurgical phase transformation has an effect on the longitudinal residual stresses, but a negligible effect on the distortion.