One of the major characteristics that affects the life of welded steel water pipes is the stress distribution caused by welding and external forces. Some studios have bean carried out on the residual stress of steel water pipes. But the results on the stress distributions by welding and complex external forces are rare, because real water pipes operate under the ground and many kinds of external forces act simultaneously on the joints. To understand the complex stress distributions of welded joints, therefore predictions by numerical or analytic methods are required. In this study, temperature and stress distributions in steel water pipes produced by welding are predicted by a three-dimensional finite element method(FEM). Based on these results, stress distributions by welding and complex external forces are evaluated by adopting the same numerical method. The influence of some post weld heat treatments on residual stress distributions is also investigated.
