• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.69-74
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• 2014

Welding distortions of large steel structures had mainly been estimated with some simplified formula obtained by lots of experience and numerical analyses for small steel structures. However, the large structures would have different characteristics of distortion with welding because of their own stiffness coming from the size itself. Therefore, in order to find some measures for preventing welding distortion of large structure, it is requite in advance to precisely analysis thermal stress and distortion during welding of the structure. Numerical analysis for larger structure has been known to take large amount of calculation time and have a poor convergency problem during the thermo-elasto-plastic calculation. In this study, a hybrid method is proposed to analysis the thermal stress and distortion of a large steel plate with the finite element analysis by incorporating with temperature distribution of the plate calculated by an analytical solution. The proposed method revealed that the thermo-mechanical analysis for welding of the large structure could be performed with a good convergence and produced precise results with much reduced time consumption.