Abstract
This study presents an analysis method for heat flow and deformation of sheet metal laser welding. A heat source model for 2-dimensional heat flow analysis of laser welding process was suggested in this paper. To investigate the availability of the heat source model, the analysis results were compared and estimated with the results of previous researches. We could get a good agreement between the results of numerical analysis and experiments in the temperature distribution of weldment. Due to the characteristics of welding process, some kinds of deformations are usually generated in a welded structure. Generally, the degree of deformation is dependent on the welding sequence constraints as well as input power Therefore, in this paper we evaluate the deformation of gas pressure vessel according to the welding sequence and input power. In the analysis of weld deformation, 2-dimensional thermo-elasto-plastic analysis was performed for the gas pressure vessel by using a commercial FE program package.