This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

Welding is an important manufacturing process used in a broad range of industries and market sectors, including automotive, aerospace, heavy manufacturing, medical, and defense. It is a critical core competency that enables these industries and market sectors to support design innovation, with significant positive impact to employment, national security, the environment, and the general US economy. Designing, fabricating, and testing a weld structure to meet the application requirements generally is a time consuming and costly process. Welding processes often result in the softening of the weld heat affected zone (HAZ), complicating prediction of the weld performance. Welding processes also induce residual stress and distortion in the welded structures, further complicating the implementation of new materials and weld designs.

Through weld modeling technology development, welding process parameters, fixtures, and tooling can be optimized to reduce the HAZ softening and minimize weld residual stress and distortion, improving performance and reducing design, fabrication and testing costs. However, weld modeling technology tools are currently accessible only to engineers and designers with a background in finite element analysis (FEA) who work with large manufacturers, research institutes, and universities with access to high-performance computing (HPC) resources. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the US do not typically have the human and computational resources needed to adopt and utilize weld modeling technology.

To close this gap and address the need of SMEs to gain access to this important design tool, online welding software modeling tools for digital manufacturing using the cloud for high performance computations were developed. The tools use three-dimensional (3-D) models and be applicable to the three most common types of welding processes: arc welding, laser welding, and hybrid laser arc welding. Standard weld joints (butt joint, T-joint, and lap joint) will be included in the software tool. Open source finite element codes were used as a solver for welding process simulation. This tools are hosted in Ohio Supercomputer center. A user can access these tools online and submit computational jobs, which will be run in supercomputers.

This presentation introduces the theory and implementation of automatic meshing generation, weld module, weld application interface, open source solver, and automatic post-processing. Simulation examples were demonstrated to illustrate how to use these tools to solve real-world problems.