Abstract
In the fabrication of offshore oil and gas facilities, the significance of dimension control is growing continuously. But, it is difficult to determine the deformation of the structure during fabrication by simple lab tests due to the large size and the complicated shape. Strain-boundary method (a kind of shrinkage method) based on the shell element was proposed to predict the welding distortion of a structure effectively. Modeling of weld geometry in shell element is still a difficult task. In this paper, a concept of imaginary temperature pair is introduced to handle the effect of geometric factors such as groove shape, plate thickness and pass number, etc. Single pass imaginary temperature pair formula is derived from the relation between the groove area and the FE mesh size. By considering the contribution of each weld layer to the whole weldment, multi-pass imaginary temperature is also derived. Since the temperature difference represents the distortion increment, cumulative distortion curve can be drawn by integrating the temperature difference. This curve will be a useful solution when engineers meet some problems occurred in the shipyard. A typical example is shown about utilization of this curve. Several verifications are conducted to examine the validity of the proposed methodology. The applicability of the model is also demonstrated by applying it to the fabrication process of the heavy ship block. It is expected that the imaginary temperature model can effectively solve the modeling problem in shell element. It is also expected that the cumulative distortion curve derived from the imaginary temperature can offer useful qualitative information about angular distortion without FE analysis.