Automatic seam weld recognition

Even a single component like the subframe displayed in the following figure can have many meters of seam welds. Defining the welds manually by clicking on each adjacent element is slow and error-prone. [1]

Automatic Seam Weld Detection, Feature Tree for Weld Properties, and Visual Weld Properties in Specialist Durability

At this time, however, the seam weld detection in Specialist Durability uses what it can find in the finite element mesh and asks you for the rest. For example, seam weld locations are found from the connectivity between elements, having different properties or belonging to different groups. The type of joint, for example overlap or "T," is found automatically, as is the angle for "Y" joints and the thickness of the connected sheets. The side of the weld (for single-sided welds), penetration, and throat thickness cannot be detected from a finite element mesh. [1]

The automatic seam weld detection needs different element groups as an input. Each element group represents one of the two sheets, belonging to the seam weld. The detection of seam welds checks the kind of attachment between the two sheets. First, all elements attached to the nodes of the first sheet and not belonging to the other sheet are collected. Then all nodes attached to these elements are determined. The same procedure is applied for the second sheet. The intersection of both groups of nodes is calculated leading to a set of nodes, which represents the seam weld. If the two sheets are attached via bars, then the nodes from both sides of the bars are found. In such cases, the nodes belonging to the first sheet are taken into account. For identifying seam welds and automatic detection, the normal vectors of the shells, directly connected to the weld, are determined. The angles between the normal vectors are used to identify the weld type. This procedure is used to detect all the seam welds in the structure. For each seam weld the type is automatically assigned but can also be manually changed.

Specialist Durability supports building groups by property ID (PID). If PIDs are used to model different groups in a definition file, the group by property command needs to be run as a first step of the analysis. Optionally the recognition analysis can use a group set as input and find all seam welds for each possible pair of groups.

If the sheets to be connected by seam welds have no different PIDs, it is possible to define them by using the mesh grouping in Specialist Durability. For a proper detection of the seam welds, just the first row of elements of each sheet at the connection has to be selected.

Learn more

Structural stress methods

Notch stress methods

Definition by the extended master connection file (XMCF)

Seam weld fatigue life analysis bibliography

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Automatic seam weld recognition, Simcenter 3D 2021.1 Series

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