Influences of external restraint on welding distortion in low carbon steel bead-on thin plate joints

The out-of-plane deformation is a serious problem in thin-plate welded joint, and it is difficult to reduce or control the distortion during welding process.External restraint is regarded as an effective method to mitigate the distortion, and it is widely used in the actual manufacturing process.In order to investigate the influence of external restraint on welding deformation in thin plate joints, a thermo-elastic-plastic finite element method based on ABAQUS software was developed to calculate welding-induced deformation.Meanwhile, welding deformation in the thin-plate joints was measured by experiments.Through comparing the numerical results with the measured data, the effectiveness of the developed computational approach was verified.Based on the simulated and experimental results, the generation mechanism of the out-of-plane deformation in thin plate bead-on joint was discussed, and the influence of external restraint on the final welding deformation was clarified.