Abstract: In the investigation of welding of 304 L austenitic stainless steel plate, the finite element numerical simulation of the stress field of multi-layer welded joints was performed by using a thermo-mechanical coupling analysis. A commercial software ABAQUS was employed for the simulation. The significant distortion of the elemental meshes of weld metal were found in the simulation due to the unique thermo-mechanical properties of the austenitic stainless steel, consequently, the abnormal outputs were frequently encountered. In this work, a tracking-unit technique and a mesh reconstruction technique were introduced in order to solve the mesh distortion problem. The numerical simulation results were compared with that of residual stress measurements. The simulated stresses were found in good agreement with the measured data in various constraint conditions. The above results may suggest that the mesh distortion modification technique could be used in the simulation of multi-layer welding of other materials.