Abstract
Resistance spot welding process is completed in very short time and there are many factors affecting on the generation of heat. It is difficult to control these experimental factors and monitor distribution of the temperature and stresses in the experimental analysis case. and too much time and expense are required for the experimental trials to fine proper welding condition. So numerical analyses have been attempted steadily, but most numerical analyses on the resistance spot welding are mainly focused on thermal behavior. Therefore, in this paper, the numerical analysis of mechanical behavior as well as heat conduction is carried out for the spot welding process. For this numerical analysis, axial symmetric computer program for the spot welding analysis by F.E.M. has been developed considering heat conduction and thermal elastic-plastic theory. Material properties depending on temperature such as density, heat conductivity, heat expansion coefficient, specific heat, yield stress, elastic modulus, and specific resistance are considered. Using the results of temperature distribution obtained from heat conduction analysis, the thermal elastic-plastic analysis is carried out to clarify mechanical behavior of spot welded specimen. In order to evaluate the effect of residual stresses, numerical analyses are carried out under tension-shear load in two cases respectively; one with residual stress, the other without residual stresses.
