| Summary: | Welding-induced deformation usually significantly degrade the dimensional accuracy of the fabricated structure, so it is crucial to mitigate welding distortion during the entire manufacturing process. Fixture is often used to control welding deformation for engineering welded structures. For thin-plate structures, if the welding procedure and conditions are not suitable, buckling distortion is prone to occur and its correction is very difficult. In order to clarify whether clamping can effectively prevent the occurrence of welding-induced buckling in thin-plate welded structures, both experimental method and numerical simulation technology were employed to investigate welding distortion in this study. Based on commercial software ABAQUS, a series of three-dimensional thermal-elastic-plastic finite element models were established to simulate welding distortions of mild-steel thin-plate structures with two different thicknesses (1.7 mm and 4.7 mm). Meanwhile, the corresponding experiments were carried out to verify the simulated results. Also, elastic buckling analyses were performed to evaluate the critical buckling stress for the thin-plate structures. Both simulated results and measured data indicate that clamping can effectively reduce the out-of-plane deformation in the weldment with 4.7 mm thickness, while it cannot prevent the occurrence of buckling distortion in the welded structure with 1.7 mm thickness.
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