The residual stresses in narrow electron or laser beam welds with high stress gradients are decreased without any contact surfaces or additional equipment by applying the welding beam after welding in a defocused mode for heating the material regions in a certain distance from the weld on both sides. In case of electron beam application, the beam is positioned and focused by the electromagnetic coil with high frequency. In case of laser beam application a laser scanner optics enables fast positioning by an optomechanic beam deflection, while defocusing of the laser beam is obtained by increasing the distance between scanner optics and workpiece. Dependent on the component geometry and on the beam power different process parameters are used. The adjustable process parameters are the radius and the power of the defocused beam and the transversal and longitudinal distances between the welding and the defocused beam. The mechanism and the influence of the process parameters are investigated by FEM-simulation and a number of experiments on a ferritic steel S355J2+N with 5 mm thickness. FEM-simulation is used to reduce the matrix of process parameters for the experiments. The best experimental result shows a stress reduction of about 70%.
Residual stresses arising during welding, especially in high energy beam welding, can reach levels up to the material specific yield strength causing service life mitigating consequences through stress relaxation or stress corrosion cracking. A number of processes were developed like stress relief annealing or the low-stress-no-distortion-technique to reduce these stresses.
But such methods are only applicable for wider welds and simple component geometries or they are cost-intensive. The method presented in this paper uses the welding beam after welding in a defocused mode for heating the material regions in a certain distance from the weld on both sides. With this process it is possible to decrease the stresses in small welds with high stress gradients without any contact surfaces or additional equipment. Dependent on the component geometry and on the laser power it is possible to use different parameters for this process. The adjustable process parameters are the radius and the power of the defocused beam and the transversal and longitudinal distances between the welding and the defocused beam. In this work the mechanism and the influence of the process parameters are investigated by FEM-simulation and a number of experiments on the ferritic steel S355J2+N with 5 mm thickness. The best experimental result presented in this paper shows a stress reduction of about 73 %.
High welding residual stresses can cause service life reducing consequences. Even though many processes have been developed to reduce these stresses, they are only applicable for wider welds and simple component geometries or are cost-intensive, respectively. The presented method uses a defocused beam after welding for heating the material regions on both sides of the weld. In this way, the welding stresses are decreased without contacting the surfaces using the available equipment. Different process parameters could be used depending on the component geometry and the laser power. The mechanism and the influence of the process parameters were investigated by FEM-simulation and experiments on S355J2+N steel and showed a stress reduction of about 73%.