Industrial application of welding temperature field and distortion visualization using FEA

Welding simulation offers with its holistic visualization of physical phenomena occurring during and after the welding process, like temperature and distortions, the opportunity to clearly identify the mechanisms responsible for the global deformations of welded parts. With this information, a target-oriented adaption of the welding parameters like welding sequence and clamping conditions is possible in order to minimize the welding distortions, whereby the required number of experimental iterations can be significantly reduced. Nevertheless, the industrial application of welding simulation is not yet established widely because of reservations regarding the computation costs and the result accuracy. The aim of this study is to show the applicability of the welding simulation within an ind ustrial environment and to com-pare its visualization capabilities and implementation to experimental procedures. For this purpose a welded assembly from the automotive industry has been simulated and compared with experimental data. The calculation is in a reasonable time frame and the characteristics of welding distortions are reproduced by the simulation in detail. Finally, it is shown that the numerical visualization with its high flexibility compared to experimental visualization has a great potential as part of a target-oriented distortion optimization to reduce experimental iteration steps.