Optimization‐improved thermal–mechanical simulation of welding residual stresses in welded connections
Le Wang, Xudong Qian
Abstract
This paper presents a novel computer-aided computational framework to determine the optimum shape parameters in a welding heat source model using a coupled supervised Gaussian process regression (GPR) and genetic algorithm (GA) approach in estimating the welding residual stresses. The experimental X-ray diffraction (XRD) approach validates the optimization-improved thermal–mechanical simulation method. The validation of the proposed approach includes the welded plates with simple geometry to welded pipe-to-plate and the circular hollow section joints with complex topologies. The optimization-derived shape parameters in a welding heat source model lead to close estimates of the temperature history and the welding residual stresses for these types of welded joints considered in this study.