Experimental and numerical investigations of residual stress distributions in the TIG welding process

Residual stresses are produced in weldments due to mismatching and non-uniform distributions of plastic and thermal strains. Attempts were made to analyze the residual stresses distributions produced in the TIG welding process using 2d and 3d finite element analyses. No attempts were made to find the optimum shape of grooves and gas flow rate to minimize the tensile residual stresses in the weldments, yet. In this paper, the effects of geometry configurations and inert gas flow rate on the residual stress distributions are presented using the thermo-elastoplastic constitutive equations and compared with the x-ray diffraction method. In this study, convection due to both air and inert gas flow rate along with conduction and radiation are considered.