Study on welding residual stress and distortion of Q345/SUS304 dissimilar steel butt weld

Based on ABAQUS software, a computational approach was developed to simulate the welding temperature field, the residual stress distribution and the deformation of Q345/SUS304 dissimilar steel multi-pass welding joint with a thickness of 10 mm. Meanwhile, experiments were carried out to measure welding residual stresses, transverse shrinkage and angular distortion of the butt weld. Through comparing the simulated results with the measured data, it was found that both residual stresses and deformation predicted by the numerical model were in good agreement with the experimental measurements. The simulation results show that the longitudinal residual stress distribution is discontinuous near the fusion line between Q345 and weld metal, and the longitudinal stresses next to the fusion line in the Q345 steel side are significantly lower than those in the both sides of this region. Also, another interesting phenomenon is that the region with high tensile stress in SUS304 side is wider than that in Q345 side. In addition, both the simulation results and the experiment measurement indicated that a relatively large angular distortion was produced in the joint after welding.