Minimal Representation and Calibration Approach to Weld Procedure Development

Gentry Wood

Presented At: 
CWA Conference 2014

Modern materials systems have made it increasingly difficult to qualify weld procedures with the traditional 鈥渢rial and error鈥 approach. A demand for improved strength and performance in the face of shrinking operating windows has often resulted in existing weld procedures failing qualifications. Even the direction of parameter change is not obvious to welding engineers and can require exhaustive experimentation to find a suitable combination. The economics of trial and error solutions can longer be accepted as industry best practice with the level of scientific and engineering understanding available. One of the challenges is to be able to express this understanding in a way that is both useful and amenable to welding practitioners. This work presents Minimal Representation and Calibration (MRC) approach to virtual welding procedure development as a standard methodology for developing welding solutions. Dominant physical mechanisms are identified, and effects from secondary factors are included in the form of correction factors in the developed expressions. These correction factors are then calibrated and presented in a form that can be easily computed thereby making them amendable to industry. This approach is demonstrated by determining the width of an isotherm from Rosenthal鈥檚 thick plate solution. Comparison of the calibrated scaled equations to Rosenthal鈥檚 solution showed excellent agreement over the entire applicable domain. Future work aims at having a handbook of expressions which can reliably predict isotherm width for applications such as HAZ sizing.

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