Seam Weld Simulation in Ansys Mechanical

Hi, this is MingYao from Ozen Engineering and in this talk I'll be going over how to model welds in ANSYS Mechanical. We can start with looking at geometry and this showcases some of the capabilities of modeling seam welds specifically.

For seam welds we're going to turn all of the parts into shells. The seam weld simulation in ANSYS Mechanical is based off the Volvo Chalmers method. This can integrate with ENCODE to help you understand the fatigue and durability of your welds. Let's first split this part in two.

So we're going to do a design split body by this face. Then we're going to mid surface. Automatically. And now we have a little gap between us. So we're going to weld this plate down to the bottom here as well as this flat plate onto the bottom. Let's go ahead and give it a try.

We're going to start with a static structural analysis. Okay. All right. So the weld modeling options are on your meshing. There are some weld options here. First thing we want to do is turn off adaptive which is already turned off here.

So if this is set to yes, we need to make sure this is set to no. Then we want to start adding some welds. So we'll do one first. We're going to do a continuous seam weld. You have the option of doing intermittent seam welds as well. Okay.

We're going to create this using edges and I'm going to select this edge. Let's go ahead and generate a mesh and see what it looks like. Right. So we didn't create this because there's another control we have to turn on. Bash connections. Needs to be yes.

And we can leave all the rest of it as default. And what this means is that it's going to try to connect it afterwards. There are a number of options inside of the weld. So for example, one of the things we want to be careful about is the heat affected zone distance.

And this heat affected zone is when you weld it, how much does the heat affect the zone? So we're going to change this to probably I'd say 5 millimeters. We can also.. the weld here actually if I turn it over here.

The weld probably spans an angle like, and the weld actually, if I turn it over here, the weld probably spans an angle like, this. So what we can do is we can adjust the height of the weld. So you can adjust the height on either side of the weld.

There's the two legs so maybe we do 2.5 on one side and 5 mm on the other side. Oh and let's adjust the edge to 20. Something like that. OK. Great. Yeah. Awesome. Okay, you can see that we've generated a mesh. Right now this is a normal weld, so it just goes down here.

You can see there's 2.5 millimeters up here and there's 5 millimeters down. What we can also do to adjust this weld is instead of the normal weld, we can do normal and angled, and we can select the angle direction to both. We can also select the material.

Right now I'm just going to pick structural steel, but we can pick other material if needed. This shows you the shape of the weld that we're going to generate. This is all done automatically, so now we can do an analysis based on this model.

We can increase the number of elements in the heat affected zone as well. Right now, we're going to do a little bit of a test. The number of heat affected zones is just one, so I'm going to bump it up to two. You can take a look at it.

Now there's two layers of heat affected zone coming off of the weld. Depending on the accuracy you want, you can see the mesh is very careful here. Now let's add the weld for this plate. I'm going to select this one side and insert a weld. We'll do a normal and angled weld.

Here, we'll do a heat affected zone of 5 mm. We can adjust the... Right now the criteria is width based. We can also do angle based, and this allows us to do maybe a 60 degree weld. The mesh doesn't look all that great. We can also, instead of using edges, we can use edges and face.

This is the bottom surface, and then this is the top surface. This is the basis of a good weld. Next up, we have to alter the area called edge safe points. Here, the edges are given the area they need for why they should be here, and the settings are for why they should be here.

Then we can do a shear walk. Use this as a guide. It will help it sit correctly. For this chip, using the shear walk will help it sit correctly. And we can do a similar thing on the other side. I'm just going to duplicate this and pick this edge. Now let's add in some supports.

Let's put a fixed support here too and let's put a force upwards in the y-axis. I have a few parts that we didn't assign material for. So these should be weld properties but I just went ahead with structural steel here.

Now in the ENCODE toolset we have some weld material information for fatigue as well as stiffness properties. So we can use that if you have the ENCODE package. Take a look at the deformation. Take a look at the stress.

We can see where the high stress regions are and now we can do a fatigue analysis. So let's go back to workbench and let's put in an ENCODE, the built-in ENCODE fatigue calculation. See. I think it's an ACT extension right now. Mechanical embedded. I think this is the mechanical embedded.

So I'm going to put in an ENCODE. Okay. Once I installed the ENCODE embedded design life I had to start it up again. And now I see the ENCODE design, mechanically embedded design life option.

So let's go ahead and get it connected and take a look at the setup for the for the weld fatigue calculations. So we can do shell seam weld analysis. Load mapper. Okay. I want a constant amplitude. So I do the static structural.

And I think what the message saying here is that we must solve the structural with nodal forces turn on. So let's go back here. Output. Turn nodal forces to on. And now that's a clear generated data. The other thing I adjusted was the welds. We want to generate name selections.

So it's creating name selections when we run the simulation with each of the welds to find the weld elements. Let's go ahead and run the solve. Okay. It's done. Okay. So it's running the simulation now. And it's completed. So we can look at life. So there's plenty of life here over a million.

Now we're going to adjust our maximum factor. I increased by 100 times. Okay. So now we see that the failure point as we expect is here on either corner. It's showing us the heat affected zone. And we can see the junctions here. And here's how the turn on performance will look like.

So inside the assembly. The model, and the distinct heat role here we can see the effective valley position that we the we can see the drag on the deformation lines over on the left edge of the male in a degree of approximate imply that we have the same chair.

We first see which is what we're front molding. For this here is a piece of outside watch this part. and the left edge of the body of each weld and specific weld patterns to capture the stiffness and the connection between the different parts.

Look at the stress and we can also evaluate design life, a weld, a specific seam shell seam weld analysis and look at the life of our weld. So that's a quick overview of how to set up welds in ANSYS Mechanical and thank you for your interest in this talk.

If you like talks like this, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can also reach us at info at OZINC.com. Thank you and have a good day. Bye bye.