Thermal, mechanical, and microstructure couplings

Abstract

The simulation of welding requires the modelling of a number of processes; of primary interest in this contribution is the modelling of the material behavior during and after welding. Arc welding can be seen chiefly as a thermo-mechano-metallurgical (TMM) or thermo-mechano-microstructure (TMMic) process, but it depends on the level of analysis of microstructural attributes and their evolutions within HAZ. In TMM analysis we seek to combine the solution of the three state variables for the thermo-mechanical-metallurgical process which are taken to be temperature, displacement, and metallurgical volume phase fraction in a consistent way taking into account the interaction between the three processes. The analysis of the TMMic process is much more complicated because five more microstructure characteristics should be considered, such as grain size, colony size, thickness of grain boundary phase, lamellar spacing, and interface morphology.