Prediction of residual stresses in multi-pass welded joint using Idealized Explicit FEM accelerated by a GPU

In the simulation of welding problems, the simulation scale is usually limited to the welding joint level. To achieve a larger scale, the authors propose the Idealized Explicit Finite Element Method (IEFEM) for shorter computing time and lower memory consumption. In addition, the proposed IEFEM is parallelized by using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The usefulness and validity of the developed method are investigated by analyzing a simple T-joint welding problem. A three-dimensional multi-pass moving heat source problem, which is very difficult to analyze with commercial FEM software because of its analytical scale, is analyzed to show the applicability of IEFEM to the large-scale welding problem. As a result, it is found that the parallelized IEFEM accelerated by a GPU on a single PC can analyze a large-scale problem having over 1,000,000 DOFs. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.