ABSTRACT
The objective of this study is to investigate the temperature and residual stress distributions of stiffened aluminum plates made of AA 5083 during metal inert gas (MIG) welding. The sequential coupling method is employed to perform the thermal-mechanical coupling responses in process of MIG welding, and the temperature-varying thermodynamic properties of AA 5083 are adopted in numerical simulation. The birth-death element strategy and the double ellipsoid heat source model are employed to simulate filled filler and the heat input of MIG welding respectively. The employed finite model is verified against experimental results of thermal histories and then is used for analyzing the effects of constraint condition on residual stress. The numerical results show that the constraint conditions employed in this study have little effect on the peak value and overall distribution of residual stress, despite the significantly difference of distribution of residual stress has been observed near the constraint point.
