The Effect of Welding Residual Stress on Whole Structure with T-Joint RHS

In the field of welding the mechanical behavior of a welded structure under consideration may be predicted via heat transfer and welding residual stress analysis. Usually such numerical analyses are limited to small regular mesh models or test specimens. Nevertheless, there is very few strength assessment of the whole structure that includes the effect of welded residual stress. The present work is based on the specialized finite element codes for the calculation of nonlinear heat transfer details and residual stress including the external load on the welded RHS (Rectangular Hollow Section) T-joint connections of the whole structure. First the thermal history of the combined fillet and butt-welded T-joint equal width cold-formed RHS are calculated using nonlinear finite element analysis (FEA) considering the quarter model of the joint. Then using this thermal history the residual stress around the joints has been evaluated. To validity the FEA result, the calculated residual stresses were compared with the available experimental results. The residual stress obtained from the quarter model is mapped to the full model and then to the whole structure model using FEM codes. The results from the FEM codes were exported to the commercial package for visualization and further analysis applying loads and boundary conditions on the whole structure. The residual stress redistribution along with the external applied load is examined computationally.