WELDING-INDUCED BUCKLING INSTABILITIES IN THIN PLATES

Welding-induced buckling distortion is one of the most problematic concerns in both design and fabrication of welded thin-plate structures. This paper deals with experimental and numerical results of the welding-induced longitudinal and/or buckling distortion occurring in welding of 6mm-thick AH36 high strength steel plates. Effects of the heat input and the plate size on the distortion were experimentally evaluated for square plates. Bead-on-plate welding was performed with the submerged arc welding process along the middle line of plate specimens. Experimental results showed that the longitudinal distortion made a single curvature in the plate, and the distortion magnitude along the weld centerline was proportional to the heat input and the plate size. The experimental results were used to examine the validity of the numerical simulation procedure for welding-induced distortion where the longitudinal distortion mode and magnitude were numerically quantified. Three-dimensional, large deformation, welding simulations were performed for selected weld models. Numerical results of the distortion mode and magnitude were in a good agreement with experimental ones. Depending on the presence of halting the distortion growth during the cooling cycle of welding, the condition discriminating buckling distortion from longitudinal distortion was established. Eigenvalue analyses were performed to check the buckling instability of tested plates with different sizes subjected to different heat inputs. The perturbation load pattern for the analysis was extracted from longitudinal inherent strain distributions. Critical buckling curve from the eigenvalue analyses revealed that the buckling instability is manifested when plate size or heat input increases.