Simulation of steady state laser hardening

A method for one step analysis of steady state processes, which is called the "displacement based reference frame" formulation, has been presented in (Balagangadhar and Tortorelli 1998) and has been applied to thermal processing in (Balagangadhar et al. 1999) and (Ruan 1999). In this paper we develop a similar method. Only the primary variables displacements (u) and heat flows (q) are used as nodal variables. For integration of material derivatives of secondary variables plastic strain, temperature and phase fraction the Discontinuous Galerkin method is used. We apply the method to the simulation of laser hardening of a steel slab.