Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Comparison between Nonlinear and Constant Thermal Properties Approaches to Estimate the Temperature in Laser Welding Simulation

2022; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.2139/ssrn.4056998

1556-5068

Arthur Mendonça Azevedo, Elisan dos Santos Magalhães, Rodrigo Gustavo Dourado da Silva, Sandro Metrevelle Marcondes Lima e Silva,

Advanced Measurement and Metrology Techniques

The nonlinear thermophysical properties significantly affect the temperature field and the appearance of the weld bead in the LASER Beam Welding (LBW). Then, it is vital to have a well-defined numerical model for analyzing the thermal behavior of the welded material. Nonetheless, many papers are still addressing the welding simulation using constant thermal properties. In this way, this paper proposes a three-dimensional thermal analysis of an unsteady LBW aiming to compare the difference between the constant and nonlinear thermal-physical properties approaches. It applies the Finite Volume Method to solve the nonlinear three-dimensional heat diffusion equation with an enthalpy function to model the phase change using a fully implicit scheme. In traditional models, these considerations promote a significant increase in computational time for the convergence of the method. Thus, CUDA-C in-house parallel routines were implemented and executed in a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to solve this problem. Lab-controlled experiments validate the proposed methodology. The results highlight the importance of using the non-linear approach. Furthermore, a detailed study proved the difficulty of knowing precisely the placement of thermocouples, given the high-temperature gradient in the welding processes. The proposed methodology proves to be a faster, cheaper, and efficient way to simulate the LBW.