VFT COMPUTATIONAL WELD MODELING CODE ADAPTED TO WARP3D: PROBLEMS OF CRACK GROWTH AND FRACTURE IN RESIDUAL STRESS FIELDS

Residual stresses caused by the welding process can drive stress corrosion crack growth, affect fatigue crack growth, lead to reheat cracking issues if the components are operated in the creep regime, and can affect the fracture response of components. The Virtual Fabrication Technology (VFTTM) computational weld modeling code, which can be used to predict the weld residual stresses (WRS) caused by the welding process, was adapted to the WARP3D open-source code recently. This effort describes the weld modeling process using VFT/WARP3D, provides predictions of WRS fields in several welded components, and provides crack growth predictions and fracture response in several example problems.
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