Large-scale Thermo-Mechanical Simulation of Laser Beam Welding Using High-Performance Computing: A Qualitative Reproduction of Experimental Results
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Mar 12, 2025
Abstract
Laser beam welding is a non-contact joining technique that has gained
significant importance in the course of the increasing degree of automation in
industrial manufacturing. This process has established itself as a suitable
joining tool for metallic materials due to its non-contact processing, short
cycle times, and small heat-affected zones. One potential problem, however, is
the formation of solidification cracks, which particularly affects alloys with
a pronounced melting range. Since solidification cracking is influenced by both
temperature and strain rate, precise measurement technologies are of crucial
importance. For this purpose, as an experimental setup, a Controlled Tensile
Weldability (CTW) test combined with a local deformation measurement technique
is used.
The aim of the present work is the development of computational methods and
software tools to numerically simulate the CTW. The numerical results are
compared with those obtained from the experimental CTW. In this study, an
austenitic stainless steel sheet is selected. A thermo-elastoplastic material
behavior with temperature-dependent material parameters is assumed. The
time-dependent problem is first discretized in time and then the resulting
nonlinear problem is linearized with Newton's method. For the discretization in
space, finite elements are used. In order to obtain a sufficiently accurate
solution, a large number of finite elements has to be used. In each Newton
step, this yields a large linear system of equations that has to be solved.
Therefore, a highly parallel scalable solver framework, based on the software
library PETSc, was used to solve this computationally challenging problem on a
high-performance computing architecture. Finally, the experimental results and
the numerical simulations are compared, showing to be qualitatively in good
agreement.
