ABSTRACT
Vibratory Stress Relief (VSR) is a new alternative technique to the conventional Thermal Stress Relief (TSR) technique to reduce the residual stress on welded components; this method has great potential to emerge as a low-cost high-efficiency technique. In this paper, the effect of vibration on the residual stress of a longitudinally stiffened plate has been numerically studied. The simulation has been carried out by adopting a sequentially coupled thermal and mechanical analysis approach by using the well-known FEM (Finite Element Method) tool ABAQUS. Post weld vibrations with different sub-resonant frequencies and amplitudes have been applied to the stiffener in order to study their effect on the residual stress. The results demonstrate the sensitivity of the peak residual stress developed in a welded stiffened plate with respect to the vibration parameters.
