Three dimensional numerical simulation of welding temperature fields in stainless steel

Three kinds of mathematical models representing welding heat sources are presented. Among them, Gaussian model and double ellipsoidal model are used to analyze the thermal distributions with finite element method. This paper analyzed the influences of the heat source models, the latent heat and the welding parameters on the temperature distributions. The comparisons between the simulated results and the experiments show that double ellipsoidal model is good for three-dimensional numerical simulations. Furthermore, the adaptive mesh technique is applied in the three-dimensional model which greatly reduces the number of nodes and elements in the simulation.