Simulation of Welding and Distortion in Ship Building

Abstract Simulation tools will continue to gain importance for both scientific investigations and industrial applications. This further applies to welding technology. The present work focuses on the simulation of distortions due to the welding of stiffeners on heavy plates in shipbuilding. An equivalent heat source (EHS) was computed by the software SimWeld to describe the energy input caused by welding. The EHS was combined with an FEM simulation of the global structure in the commercial program SYSWELD. Therefore an interface between the SimWeld platform and SYSWELD was implemented. The simulation results were compared with a welded demonstrator. The predicted displacements correlate closely with the experimental data. Using the combined approach the quality of the prediction was significantly improved against the typical method of heat source parameter identification, which is based on experimental results. The results allow for the optimization of welding sequences and for the minimization of buckling in shipbuilding.