Large-scale thermo-mechanical simulation of laser beam welding using high-performance computing: A qualitative reproduction of experimental results

Laser beam welding (LBW) is a non-contact joining technique that has gained significant importance in modern industrial manufacturing. One potential problem, however, is the formation of solidification cracks, which particularly affects alloys with a pronounced melting range. The aim of the present work is the development of computational methods and software tools to numerically simulate LBW. In order to obtain a sufficiently accurate solution, a large number of finite elements has to be used. Therefore, a highly parallel scalable solver framework, based on the software library PETSc, was used to solve this computationally challenging problem on a high-performance computing architecture. Finally, the experimental results and the numerical simulations are compared. They are found to be in good qualitative agreement, which confirms the validity of the numerical simulations and allows for a better interpretation of the experimentally observed strain distribution.