Nomasys

Weld distortion is the plight of every welder. If you are an engineer or a welder, you have likely encountered some shrinkage on your weld project. Finding the best welding sequence to minimize distortion is a must for welders. It contributes greatly to reduce the time-to-market and post-process cost. Concerning the latter, here are some ways you can fix the weld distortion:

1. Heat Straightening

2. Hot Mechanical Straightening

3. Hot Working.

But those techniques add some cost on your weld project and not to mention that it requires a high-level of expertise. Moreover, it might be also a gamble when the structure and weld are particularly complex. To solve this equation, welding simulation is a very powerful tool. You virtually setup your welding process and calculate the distortion according to the sequence, clamping system, material, operating conditions, etc. JWELD (JSOL) was specifically developed to address industrial welding and help welders to optimize automatically their process.

An example is given hereafter with a panel including 20 parts and 19 welds (by JWRI in Osaka University). The objective is to find the best sequence of welding to minimize the maximum nodal displacement of the panel during welding.

From a nominal sequence, a DOE of 200 designs was automaticaly generated and run using a Neural Network based optimization tool (by Optimal Computing). It shows that the maximum displacement goes from 53 mm to 16 mm after optimization.

JWELD Welding MEGA (by JSOL, Japan) was used to perform this analysis.