Simulating welding distortion in fillet welding of stiffened plate structures

Results from weld simulations and experiments for fillet-weld procedures are brought together to provide information on distortion in stiffened plate fabrications. The results of thermocouple and thermographic studies are used to expand on thermal aspects, described initially for small-scale fabrications in Chapter 7 . Computationally efficient solution methods are applied to large-scale fabrication cases and the results compared with experiments. Special attention is given to application of the transverse contraction strain (TCS) algorithm and ways in which it can be fine-tuned to match different models of transverse constraint. Modelling methods for multiple parallel stiffeners are given and the results of full-scale experiments are compared with the results of a computational case study in which different sequences of stiffener attachment were applied.