Influence of Material Model on Prediction Accuracy of Welding Residual Stress in an Austenitic Stainless Steel Multi-pass Butt-Welded Joint

Both experimental method and numerical simulation technology were employed to investigate welding residual stress distribution in a SUS304 steel multi-pass butt-welded joint in the current study. The main objective is to clarify the influence of strain hardening model and the yield strength of weld metal on prediction accuracy of welding residual stress. In the experiment, a SUS304 steel butt-welded joint with 17 passes was fabricated, and the welding residual stresses on both the upper and bottom surfaces of the middle cross section were measured. Meanwhile, based on ABAQUS Code, an advanced computational approach considering different plastic models as well as annealing effect was developed to simulate welding residual stress. In the simulations, the perfect plastic model, the isotropic strain hardening model, the kinematic strain hardening model and the mixed isotropic-kinematic strain hardening model were employed to calculate the welding residual stress distributions in the multi-pass butt-welded joint. In all plastic models with the consideration of strain hardening, the annealing effect was also taken into account. In addition, the influence of the yield strength of weld metal on the simulation result of residual stress was also investigated numerically. The conclusions drawn by this work will be helpful in predicting welding residual stresses of austenitic stainless steel welded structures used in nuclear power plants.