Maritime Engineering and Technology Guedes Soares et al.

2012 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-0-415-62146-5

Numerical investigations to study the effect of weld parameters on the

temperature-time history in steel plates
B.Q. Chen, M. Adak & C. Guedes Soares
Centre for Marine Technology and Engineering (CENTEC), Instituto Superior Tcnico,
Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

ABSTRACT: Numerical investigations are carried out to study the effect of weld parameters on the temperaturetime history in a butt-joint weld steel plate. A mathematical model of transient thermal process in welding is
established to simulate the transient thermal analysis with moving heat source model (Gaussian function) by using
finite element method. Results are compared to numerical and experimental results obtained from a previous
study. Parametric studies based on numerical results are carried out for different weld parameters including
welding speed, plate thickness, heat input, heat source type and finite element mesh.

1
1.1

INTRODUCTION
Introduction to welding

Welding is a complex industrial process that often

requires several trials before it can be done right. The
welding processes are carried out by skilled workers, but in the past few years automated machines
and robots are introduced in shipyards. To obtain the
expected productivity through mechanization, high
precision of parts to be assembled must be kept.
Therefore in the shipbuilding industry dimensional
predictability is important. In order to produce a highquality product, the accuracy control should be kept
through the whole assembly line. The concept of accuracy control should be incorporated in the structural
design, so that the designer can produce a better design
accounting for the geometric inaccuracy.
Generally, welding can be defined as any process in
which two or more pieces of metal are joined together
by the application of heat, pressure, or a combination
of both. Most of the processes may be grouped into two
main categories. pressure welding, in which the weld
is achieved by pressure; and heat welding, in which
the weld is achieved by heat. Heat welding is the most
common welding used today.
During the welding process, a liquid weld pool
is created through the interaction of an intense heat
source and the substrates being joined (see Figure 1).
Melting on the front side of the weld pool eliminates
the interface between the materials, while solidification on the back side of the weld pool fuses the
substrates together to create a solid joined part. Surrounding the fusion zone is a heat-affected zone, where
the substrate is heated to temperatures up to the melting point of the metal being joined. Solidification in
the fusion zone and solid-state phase transformations
in the heat-affected zone are responsible for dramatic

Figure 1. Illustration of a fusion weld.

changes in the microstructure and properties of the

welding joint.
1.2 Arc welding
Arc welding, which is heat-type welding, is one of
the most important manufacturing operations for the
joining of structural elements for a wide range of
applications, including guide way for ships, bridges,
trains, building structures, automobiles, and nuclear
reactors, to name a few. It requires a continuous supply
of either direct or alternating electric current, which
creates an electric arc to generate enough heat to melt
the metal and form a weld.
The arc welding process is a remarkably complex operation involving extremely high temperatures,
which produce severe distortions and high levels of
residual stresses. These extreme phenomena tend to
reduce the strength of a structure, which becomes
vulnerable to fracture, buckling, corrosion and other
type of failures. The most widely used arc welding
processes are shielded metal arc welding (SMAW),

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gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW), gas metal arc

welding (GMAW), and submerged metal arc welding
(SMAW).
2 THEORY OF THE WELDING PROCESS
2.1

Heat transfer during welding process

Welding is a process with sharply local heating to

high temperature and rapid cooling afterwards, during which the temperature highly depends on the time
and location, while the mechanical properties of the
material varies with the temperature, and melting,
phase changing and latent heat exist. To sum up, the
weld induced temperature field analysis is a typical
nonlinear transient heat transfer issue.
During the welding process, the temperatures of different parts of the weldment vary immensely due to the
local heating. Consequently, heat transfer occurs both
inside the weldment and between the weldment and
surrounding.
Heat transfer mechanisms can be grouped into three
broad categories.
1) Conduction. Regions with greater molecular
kinetic energy will pass their thermal energy to
regions with less molecular energy through direct
molecular collisions, a process known as conduction. In metals, a significant portion of the
transported thermal energy is also carried by
conduction-band electrons.
2) Convection. When heat conducts into a static fluid
it leads to a local volumetric expansion. As a
result of gravity-induced pressure gradients, the
expanded fluid parcel becomes buoyant and displaces, thereby transporting heat by fluid motion
(i.e. convection) in addition to conduction. Such
heat-induced fluid motion in initially static fluids
is known as free convection.
3) Radiation. All materials radiate thermal energy in
amounts determined by their temperature, where
the energy is carried by photons of light in the
infrared and visible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. When temperatures are uniform,
the radioactive flux between objects is in equilibrium and no net thermal energy is exchanged.
The balance is upset when temperatures are not
uniform, and thermal energy is transported from
surfaces of higher to surfaces of lower temperature.
Understanding of the theory of heat flow is essential in order to study the welding process analytically,
numerically or experimentally.
2.2

Development in prediction of welding

The problem of welding distortion during large steel

fabrications leads to dimensional inaccuracies and
misalignments of structural members, which can
result in corrective tasks or rework when tolerance limits are exceeded. This in turn, increases the cost of production and leads to delays. In fabrication and design
industries, for example, expenses for rework such as

straightening could cost millions of dollars. Therefore,

the problems of distortion and residual stresses are
always of great concern in welding industry.
In order to deal with this problem, it is necessary
to predict the amount of distortion resulting from the
welding operations. One way to predict the distortion
and shrinkage of steel welding is through numerical
analysis such as finite element analysis (FEA). Once
the techniques to predict the distortion and shrinkage are identified, then the problems can be controlled
accordingly.
Within the welding procedures, there are many factors such as welding process type, welding process
parameters, welding sequence, preheat patterns, level
of constraint and joint details that contribute to the
distortion of the welded structure. Knowing which
parameters have an effect on the quality of the weld
and which parameters give the most significant effect
on the weld quality are the main issues in welding
industry.
Welds are made at the junction of various pieces
that make up the weldment. The junctions of parts, or
joints, are defined as the location where two or more
members are to be joined. Parts being joined to produce the weldment may be in the form of rolled plate,
sheet, pipes, castings, forgings, or billets.
2.3 Mathematic model of heat source
The research activity in welding simulation started
decades ago. Rosenthal (1941) was among the first
researchers to develop an analytical solution of heat
flow during welding based on conduction heat transfer for predicting the shape of the weld pool for two
and three-dimensional welds. Using the Fourier partial differential equation (PDE) of heat conduction,
he introduced the moving coordinate system to develop
solutions for the point and line heat sources and applied
this successfully to address a wide range of welding
problems. His analytical solutions of the heat flow
made possible for the first time the analysis of the
process from a consideration of the welding parameters namely the current, voltage, welding speed, and
weld geometry.
His analytical solution (Rosenthal 1946) is based
on the concentration heat source, but it did not consider
the changes of material properties with temperature,
the phase change and latent heat. Hence, the result
deviation in the heat affect zone is relatively big.
Nevertheless, owing to its acceptable accuracy in the
low temperature zone and its simplicity, it has been
widely used in engineering applications.
Since the pioneering work of Rosenthal, Friedman
(1975) proposed to apply the Gaussian Distributed
heat source to approximately express the heat flux in
heating spot, as shown in Figure 2.
The heat flux q(r), with a distance r from the heat
source center, can be expressed as:

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For a point within the first semi-ellipsoid located

in front of the welding arc, the heat flux equation is
described as:

where fr is the heat input proportion in the rear part.

For points (x, y, z) within the second semi-ellipsoid,
covering the rear section of the arc, the heat flux
equation is described as:

Figure 2. Gaussian distributed heat source.

In the past twenty years, considerable interest in the

thermal aspects of welding was expressed by many
researchers, such as Michaleris and DeBiccari (1997),
Wahab et al. (1998), and Gery et al. (2005).
Figure 3. Double-ellipsoidal distributed heat source.

where qmax is the maximum heat flux in the center of

the heat source; Q = IU is the heat flux of the arc;
and R is the radius of the heating spot.
For the normal welding process, such as GTAW and
SMAW, the Gaussian distributed heat source modal is
proved to provide precise enough results.
However, for the welding process in which the
momentum effect of arc is considerably large, the
disadvantage of the Gaussian distribution model in
result accuracy appears due to neglecting the effect
of the arc stiffness.
To solve this problem, Goldak et al. (1985) initially
proposed a semi-ellipsoidal heat source in which heat
flux is distributed in a Gaussian manner throughout
the heat sources volume.
Heat flux reaches the maximum value in the center of heat source, whose distribution is given by the
following equation.

where A, B, C are the heat flow distribution coefficient.

However, their experience with this heat source
showed that the predicted temperature gradients in
front of the arc were less steep than experimentally
observed ones and gradients behind the arc were
steeper than those measured. To overcome this, they
combined two semi-ellipsoids and proposed a new heat
source called double ellipsoidal heat source, as shown
in Figure 3.
Since two different semi-ellipsoids are combined
to give the new heat source, the heat flux within each
semi-ellipsoid are described by different equations.

FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS AND RESULTS

3.1 Considerations
Generally speaking, severely physical and chemical
reactions occur during the welding process, between
the base metal and the melted pool, which includes
the thermodynamics and heat transfer, the interaction
between the heat source and metal, solidification in the
welding line, the phase transformations in the welding
joint, and so on. To focus on the temperature field of
the welding structure, some factors that have a small
effect on it are supposed to deserve low weight in
consideration or sometimes even be neglected. Hence,
several simplifications have been considered during
the simulation.
First of all, the chemical reactions and agitation
and convection phenomena, and the phase change are
not taken into consideration.
Secondly, the heat transfer between the base metal
and the experiment table are neglected, assuming that
there is only convection heat transfer between the
edges of the work piece and the air, without radiation
heat transfer.
Thirdly, assume that the welding rod is of the same
material as the substrate.
Finally, assuming that the welding process is conducted with the constant heating speed V; the heat
source is complied with the Gaussian model.
3.2 Material properties
The material properties of metal, for instance, the specific heat, thermal conductivity, modulus of elasticity

287

Table 1. Material Properties for Steel 25 (Biswas et al. 2001).

Temperature ( C)
Thermal conductivity
(W m1 C1 )
Specific heat capacity
(J kg1 C1 )
Poissons ratio ()
Thermal expansion coefficient
(106 C1 )
Modulus of elasticity (GPa)
Film coefficient (W m2 C1 )

0
51.9
450
0.28
10
200
1.0

100
51.1
499
0.31
11
200
6.5

300

450

46.1
566

631

0.33
12

0.34
13

200
7.5

and yield stress, vary with the change of temperature. The average values can be used in calculations
if the temperature does not vary too much. While
in the welding process, the temperature of weldment
varies shapely. In this case, to neglect the material
properties differences by temperature will result in big
deviations. Consequently, the temperature-dependent
material properties are supposed to be taken into
consideration in welding process simulation.
In this analysis, eight-node three-dimensional brick
thermal element, Solid 70, is used. The Solid 70
element has a three-dimensional thermal conduction
capability. It has eight nodes with a single degree of
freedom, temperature, at each node and is applicable to
a three-dimensional, steady-state or transient thermal
analysis. The element also can compensate for mass
transport heat flow from a constant velocity field. If
the model containing the conducting solid element is
also to be analyzed structurally, the element should be
replaced by an equivalent structural element (such as
Solid 45 or Solid 185).
The C-Mn steel whose temperature-dependent
material properties are listed in Table 1 was used.
3.3

41.1

150
7.3

550
37.5
706
0.36
14
110
7.2

600
35.6
773

720
30.6
1080

800
26.0
931

1450
29.5
438

0.37
14

0.37
14

0.42
14

0.47
15

88
7.2

20
7.1

20
7.1

2
7.0

Figure 4. Dimensions of work piece.

FE modeling

In this work, the butt welding process has been simulated in Ansys. The dimensions of the work piece
are 300*260*6 mm3 , as shown in Figure 4 in which the
arc center is moving along the x+ direction in line KI.
Furthermore, for the sake of saving computational
time and reducing computer configurations requirement, a half model has been taken in the simulation,
with symmetric boundary condition setting in the
symmetry plane, since the model is symmetric along
the X-Z plane.
Figure 5 displays the element mesh of the geometric
model to be solved. 2 mm element size is used in the
welding zone, while 8 mm element size is used in the
area far away from the heat affected zone (FAZ). Free
mesh is performed in the middle zone.
Meanwhile, a finer mesh was carried on, to study
the effect of the mesh style on the result. In this case,
four different element sizes, 1.25 mm, 2.5 mm, 5 mm,
and 10 mm are modeled. And all the elements are
hexahedrons (see Figure 6).

Figure 5. Element mesh.

Figure 6. Finer element mesh.

FE results demonstrates that the temperature distribution of the node located in the center of the welding
line are almost identical since the maximum deviation
in all time steps are only 0.21%, which means the relatively coarser model is satisfied to be utilized in the
simple butt welding process.

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Figure 9. Temperature distribution in time = 10 s.

Figure 7. Comparison with Biswass result.

Figure 10. Temperature distribution in time = 20 s.

Figure 8. Temperature distribution in time = 1 s.

Figure 11. Temperature distribution in time = 40 s.

3.4 Verification
As presented by several researchers, finite element
method (FEM) has been successfully used to evaluate thermal response of the complex welding process.
In the present work, the finite element (FE) package
ANSYShas been used to simulate the arc welding
process.
Quite a few researchers have addressed this topic,
Tsai & Eagar (1983), Guedes Soares et al. (1998) and
Biswas et al. (2007), to name a few.
In Figure 7, a finite element simulation of a line
heating process was verified using the work of Biswas
et al. (2007). To do this, the same geometry and
material properties as Biswass model were using,
the heating process with total heat input 5350 Watts
and heating speed 6 mm/sec was simulated using
ANSYScodes.
From Figure 4, it shows that the temperature history
result of present work is in a good agreement with the
experimental result obtained by Biswas et al. (2007).

3.5

Results and discussion

Figure 8 to Figure 12 display the temperature field

distributions in the heating process, in the finer mesh
case. It is obvious that the temperatures increase
rapidly in the beginning, from room temperature to
over 350 C within one second. After that, the temperature field tends to be stable, which means the
temperature of a certain point is varied by time, but
the certain temperature is moving with the heat source,
meanwhile, the peak temperature is retaining of a value
of approximately 547 C.

Figure 12. Temperature distribution in time = 50 s.

Figure 13. Temperature distribution in time = 100 s.

During this period, the contour in the front of the

heat source is quite dense. On the contrary, in the rear
part, the temperature distribution gradient is comparatively small. Generally speaking, the shapes of the
contours are close to ellipsoids.
The cooling process in the finer mesh case is
described in the following four figures, from Figure
13 to Figure 15. After removing the heat source, the
peak temperatures drop to about 350 C in 50 seconds.
However, the changing rate is relatively lower comparing with the heating process. In the cooling stage, the
contours enlarge by time (see Figure 14). After 6000
seconds, the peak temperature becomes less than 70 C
(see Figure 15) and eventually the temperatures in all
nodes are tending to the room temperature.

289

Figure 14. Temperature distribution in time = 1000 s.

Figure 18. Temperatures of nodes group 1.

Figure 15. Temperature distribution in time = 6000 s.

Figure 19. Nodes Group 2 (parallel to Group 1).

Figure 16. Simulation results in different meshes.

Figure 17. Nodes in the welding line (Group 1).

Figure 16 demonstrates that the peak temperatures

of the node located in the center of the welding line,
in the coarser and finer mesh, are 1308 C and 1126 C
respectively.
To obtain more detailed information of the temperature field, several groups of nodes are selected.

Firstly 7 nodes in the welding line with uniform distance are chosen (see Figure 17), and the temperatures
of these 7 points are plotted in Figure 18, which indicates that, after reaching a stable state, the curve of the
temperature of each node is of the same tendency, and
for a certain node, the temperature shapely increases
when it is subject to heat input, and then fall down
with a relatively lower speed after achieving the peak
temperature. The first node and the last one are with
lower/higher temperature than the other nodes, which
is due to the less/more heat affected time.
Another 7 points are selected in Figure 19, whose
temperature distributions are similar to the previous
ones, expect the peak temperatures are much lower
since they are a little far from the heat source, and the
decrements of temperatures are slower (see Figure 20).
In the Z direction, 3 more nodes are taken as
Figure 21. Figure 22 shows their temperatures distributions. The temperature reduces with the increment
of distance from the heating surface but the effect is
not so significant.
In the Y direction, 7 nodes are marked in Figure 23,
with the distances away from the center line of 2, 4,
6, 8, 14 and 26 mm respectively. The more distances
away from the heating line, the lower temperatures
produced (see Figure 24). Figure 25 illustrates the
relationship between the peak temperatures and the
distances from the welding line.

290

Figure 23. Nodes Group 4 (in y direction).

Figure 20. Temperatures of nodes group 2.

Figure 24. Temperatures of nodes group 4.

Figure 21. Nodes Group 3 (in z direction).

Figure 25. Temperature-distance curve.

Figure 22. Temperatures of nodes group 3.

3.6

Parametric effect study

For the sake of finding out the effects of welding

process parameters (welding speed and heat input)
and geometric parameter (thickness of the metal plate),
series of calculations with different parameters have
been performed.
Figure 26 explains the temperature distributions of
the node located in the middle of the welding line,
in 5 cases of variant welding speeds, 4 mm/s, 6 mm/s,
8 mm/s, 10 mm/s and 12 mm/s. It can be concluded

that the lower the speed is, the higher temperature got
in the result.
The heat input in the previous calculation is 5350 W.
Keeping the fixed welding speed 6 mm/s, and changing the heat input to 3000 W, 6500 W and 7950 W,
then the corresponding temperature distributions are
plotted in Figure 27. There is no doubt that the higher
heat input results in higher temperature.
To study the effect of the plate thickness on the temperature field result, 5 cases are conducted in which
the welding speeds are fixed to 6 mm/s, the heat inputs

291

CONCLUSIONS

The model of transient thermal process in welding

which is a material nonlinear procedure is described
in the present work, to simulate the moving of the
heat source, and to predict the temperature field of
the entire weldment. The function of Gauss was chosen as heat source model, and was used as function
command to apply load of moving heat source.
The effects of welding speed, plate thickness and
heat input, heat source type and finite element mesh
on temperature field distribution were discussed. It
has been proved that all these three parameters play
an essential role in affecting the final temperature
distribution.
Figure 26. The effect of welding speed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been performed in a EU funded
project Network of Excellence in Marine Structures (MARSTRUCT) under contract TNE3-CT2003-506141.
REFERENCES

Figure 27. The effect of heat input.

Figure 28. The effect of plate thickness.

are set as 5350 W, but the plate thickness changes

as 4 mm, 6 mm, 8 mm, 10 mm and 12 mm. It can be
proved in Figure 28 that the thinner the plate, the higher
temperature is obtained.

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