Numerical Analysis of Temperature Distribution in Tandem Welding Process

Abstract

In this study, the numerical solutions for the steady-state heat conduction problem with uniform heat source, the steady-state heat conduction problem with convective heat transfer and the transient heat conduction problem have been developed using finite difference method. These numerical solutions have been validated with analytical solutions. After observing the good agreements between numerical solutions and analytical solutions, these three different problems combined to simulate the tandem welding process. The first objective of this study is to present a numerical simulator for the transient heat conduction problem that includes non-uniform moving heat sources and convective heat transfer term. This numerical simulator contains explicit and implicit time discretization methods. In this simulator, it is possible to change the grid sizes, time step sizes, total simulation time, distance between electrodes, magnitude of the sources' power, speed of the sources, etc. Secondly, the temperature distribution of single and twin wire welding processes have been compared using proposed numerical simulator to investigate the premature solidification of liquid metal in low-temperature zone of molten pool. Thirdly, experimental study was carried out using Fluke Thermal Imager to validate numerical results. It was obtained that the maximum temperature of numerical result is very close to the maximum temperature of experimental result with 0.248 % error. Finally, the all Matlab codes related to developed numerical simulator have been added to Appendix to facilitate other researchers’ work.