Journal of Materials Processing Technology 134 (2003) 59±69

Numerical simulation of the laser welding process

in butt-joint specimens
S.A. Tsirkasa,*, P. Papanikosb, Th. Kermanidisa
a
Laboratory of Technology and Strength of Materials, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics,
University of Patras, Patras 26 500, Greece
b
Institute of Structures and Advanced Materials (ISTRAM), 57 Patron-Athinon Road, P.O. Box 1361, Patras 26441, Greece
Received 13 March 2002; received in revised form 26 July 2002; accepted 11 September 2002

Abstract

A three-dimensional ®nite element model has been developed to simulate the laser welding process and predict laser welded panel
distortions. The ®nite element calculations were performed using the SYSWELD FE code, which takes into account thermal, metallurgical
and mechanical aspects. The simulation of the laser welding process was performed using a nonlinear heat transfer analysis, based on a
keyhole formation model, and a coupled transient thermo-mechanical analysis. The analysis takes into account metallurgical transformations
using the temperature dependent material properties and the continuous cooling transformation (CCT) diagram. The geometry examined was
a butt-joint specimen that consisted of thick AH36 shipbuilding steel plates, using different welding parameters. Experimental testing was
carried out to measure the distortions of the welded specimens and verify the FE approach. The FE results are in good agreement with
experimental measurements.
# 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Laser welding; Butt-joint; Finite element method; SYSWELD code; Thermo-mechanical analysis; Metallurgical transformations; Distortions

1. Introduction Numerical simulation of the welding process has been a

High power density welding technologies, such as laser
welding, have been increasingly utilised in industrial
manufacturing. The process of laser welding offers a great
potential for the new product design. Compared to other
welding processes (arc welding, solid-state welding,
induction welding, friction stir welding, etc.) less heat
is coupled into the workpiece due to laser welding, result-
ing in a small heat affected zone (HAZ) and low panel
distortion.
During laser welding, complicated phenomena such as
temperature dependency of material properties phase transi-
tion (i.e. melting and evaporation), laser light absorption and
re¯ection in a plasma occur in a very short time. Traditional
trial and error approaches based on welding experiments
have encountered many dif®culties to optimise the laser
welding process. In order to extend the industrial applica-
tions of laser welding and make the process more reliable, it
is necessary to develop appropriate control techniques.
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: ‡30-610-991027; fax: ‡30-610-997190.
E-mail address: tsirkas@mech.upatras.gr (S.A. Tsirkas).
major topic in welding research for several years. The
results of simulations can be used to explain the physical
essence of some complex phenomena in welding process
explicitly and can be also used as the basis for optimising
the welding parameters. Simulation of the laser welding
process enables estimation of transient stresses, residual
stresses and distortions. These can be used to evaluate
structural misalignments and unexpected failures due to
overstressing caused by the superposition of in-service
loads and welding induced residual stresses. However,
the simulation of the welding process is not an easy task
since it involves the interaction of thermal, mechanical and
metallurgical phenomena.
A number of analytical and numerical models of welding
processes have been used to evaluate temperature and stress
distribution during the welding process and predict the
residual stresses and ®nal distortions of structural compo-
nents. These include analytical models [1±4], two-dimen-
sional ®nite element models [5,6] and three-dimensional
®nite element models of laser [7±10] and arc welding
[11±23]. Similar analytical and three-dimensional ®nite
element models for laser forming have been developed in
[24,25]. In the above three-dimensional models, not all of

0924-0136/02/$ ± see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 9 2 4 - 0 1 3 6 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 9 2 1 - 4
60 S.A. Tsirkas et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 134 (2003) 59±69
the parameters in¯uencing the welding process are taken
into account. These parameters include: microstructural
transformation due to phase transformation, heat ¯ux simu-
lation and variation of thermal and mechanical material
properties with temperature.
It has been recognised by many researchers that the most
important aspects of the simulation of the welding process
are the introduction of the metallurgical transformations into
the model and the correct representation of the keyhole. In
the case of arc welding these aspects have been taken into
account in the works of [19±22]. However, to the author's
knowledge, no such attempt has been made for the case of
laser welding of steel.
In the present investigation a three-dimensional ®nite
element model for the laser welding simulation was devel-
oped. It considers a Gaussian distribution of heat ¯ux using a
moving heat source with a conical shape, as proposed in
[26]. For the thermal solution the quasi-steady-state tech-
Fig. 1. Mesh of the model (a) and the weld area (b).
nique was used. A nonlinear thermo-mechanical analysis
was performed using temperature dependent material prop-
erties and metallurgical transformations. The application of
the model to the case of butt-welding was veri®ed with an
experimental investigation.
2. Finite element modelling
During the laser welding process, many mechanisms are
taking place in the material of the weldments. A very narrow
zone under the laser beam is suddenly heated, vaporised and
locally fused. After welding and cooling of the melt mate-
rial, the assembly of the welded pieces is achieved. On the
exposed area a keyhole is shaped. The elevated temperature
gradients present in this area during both the heated and the
cooling along with the sharp decrease of mechanical proper-
ties during heating, yield to nonhomogeneous permanent
 S.A. Tsirkas et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 134 (2003) 59±69
strains and residual stresses after the process. The result is
permanent distortions in the welded parts.
A three-dimensional ®nite element model was developed
to simulate the laser welding process for the butt-joint of two
thin steel plates using the commercial code SYSWELD. The
geometry of the weld structure, shown in Fig. 1(a), was
modelled using two types of elements; three-dimensional
volume elements with eight nodes and two-dimensional
membrane elements with four nodes were used. The
three-dimensional elements were used for the basic body
structure and the two-dimensional elements for the surface
of the welded parts in order to simulate the boundary
between the structure and the environment. A dense mesh
was used in the area along the weld line, as shown in
Fig. 1(b), and a coarser mesh for the rest of the structure.
The ®nal mesh was the result of compromise between
computing time and accuracy.
For the solution a thermo-elasto-plastic analysis asso-
ciated with metallurgical transformations was performed
using the ®nite element code enhanced with user subrou-
tines. The solution was generated in two basic steps. First a
transient heat transfer analysis with metallurgical transfor-
mations was performed and the resulting temperature ®eld
was used on the second step as input to the mechanical
analysis. An appropriate time-stepping scheme was used for
each analysis to achieve fast convergence of the solution and
reasonable accuracy. The ¯ow chart of Fig. 2 shows the
procedure for the FE calculation.
As shown in the ¯ow chart the following steps were taken
prior to the thermal analysis. First the geometry of the
Fig. 2. Flow chart of the welding simulation procedure.
61
specimen was modelled and the mesh was generated as
described above. Then the heat source was simulated as
described in details in the next section. The phase transfor-
mations were subsequently de®ned and the boundary and the
initial conditions were applied in the form of heat loss and
temperature of the environment, respectively.
The thermal analysis was conducted using temperature
dependent thermal material properties. The values of these
properties, for the shipbuilding steel AH36, are shown in
Fig. 3(a) and were taken from [17]. The governing partial
differential equation for the transient heat conduction is
  2   2   2   
@ T @ T @ T _ ˆ r…T†Cp …T† @T
k…T† ‡ ‡ ‡ Q
@x2 @y2 @z2 @t
where x; y; z are the Cartesian coordinates, Q_ the internal
heat generation, r the density, k the thermal conductivity and
Cp the speci®c heat are functions of temperature T.
The results of the thermal analysis (temperature distribu-
tion) were input to the mechanical analysis in conjunction
with the mechanical properties variation with temperature
and the boundary conditions (clamping). The mechanical
analysis was performed using, a thermo-elasto-plastic mate-
rial formulation with Von-Mises yield criterion
q
sv ˆ 12 ‰…s1 s2 †2 ‡ …s2 s3 †2 ‡ …s3 s1 †2 Š
with s1, s2 and s3 being the principal stresses, coupled to a
kinematic hardening rule. Temperature dependent material
properties were used. These values were found in [17] and
are shown in Fig. 4(a) and (b). The temperature dependent
62 S.A. Tsirkas et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 134 (2003) 59±69
Fig. 3. (a) Variation of thermal material properties with temperature, and (b) CCT diagram.
material properties were inserted in the FE code in a table
form. The input to the different analyses, shown in the ¯ow
chart of Fig. 2, will be described in detail in the next
sections.
2.1. Heat input
The heat input to the weld is generally calculated from the
energy supplied. The heat input distribution will determine the
size and shape of the weld pool. In order to simulate the heat
distribution and ¯ow in the welding direction, the laser beam is
modelled as a three-dimensional moving heat source. The
model of the heat source assumes a Gaussian heat ¯ux
distribution on the weld pool simulated by a cone. This model
has the capability to be changed by the simple change of
various geometrical parameters in order to simulate different
weld pools that correspond to different welding parameters.
During laser welding part of the energy generated by the
laser source is lost before absorbed by the material of the
work piece. The energy loss is due to: (a) the gap, which
possibly exists between the welding pieces, and (b) the
re¯ection from the specimen surface. The rest of the energy
is absorbed by the work piece. The energy loss for the
material under investigation has been evaluated experimen-
tally in [9,27]. For a butt-joint laser welding this energy loss
is approximately 30% of the nominal power of the laser
source. Accordingly, the absorbed energy was considered as
70% of the laser power.
It has been found [28±31] that the best simulation of the
keyhole is a cone following a Gaussian distribution of heat
¯ux, which can be computed according to the formula
2P 1  z
Qˆ e …r=r0 †2
1
pr02 H H
 S.A. Tsirkas et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 134 (2003) 59±69 63

Fig. 4. Variation of mechanical material properties with temperature: (a) Young's modulus (E), Poisson's ratio (v) and thermal expansion coefficient (a) and
(b) yield strength of the material (sy).

where P is the absorbed laser beam power, r0 the initial
radius (at the top of the keyhole), H the depth, r the current
radius, i.e. the distance from the cone axis and z is the current
depth. The heat ¯ux was implemented into the FE code by
developing a FORTRAN subroutine.
2.2. Phase transformation
study a metallurgical analysis based on phase transformation
laws [32], was performed in order to simulate the phase
transformations during welding.
For the phase transformations involving diffusion for
steels (austenitic, ferritic±perlitic, and bainitic transforma-
tions), under isothermal conditions, the Johnson±Mehl±
Avrami law was used

The inclusion of metallurgical transformations in the  n…T† !!

t
welding simulation constitutes a major problem and were p…T; t† ˆ p…T† 1 exp
tR …T†
not taken into account in many cases [7±10]. In the present

Table 1
Chemical composition of AH36 steel (%)

C Cr Mn Ni Si V Al Cu S P Sn Nb

0.130 0.026 1.418 0.012 0.346 0.056 0.028 0.015 0.007 0.023 0.002 0.020
64 S.A. Tsirkas et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 134 (2003) 59±69

Fig. 6. Position of LVDTs during welding.

where p represents the phase proportion obtained after an

in®nite time at temperature T, tR the delay time, and n is the
exponent associated with the reaction speed.
The martensitic transformations were described using the
Koistinen±Marburger law

pm …T† ˆ pm …1 exp… b…MS T††† with T  MS

In this case, pm represents the phase proportion obtained at
an in®nitely low temperature (pm is frequently assimilated to
1), and MS and b characterise initial transformation tem-
perature and evolution of the transformation process accord-
ing to temperature, respectively. The parameters of the
Johnson±Mehl±Avrami model were extracted from the con-
tinuous cooling transformation (CCT) diagram of Fig. 3(b)
according to the cooling speed and were inserted in the FE
code in a tabular form.

2.3. Boundary and initial conditions

During the welding process, the heat was supplied to the

Fig. 5. Experimental setup (a), and process (b).
weld pool by the laser beam. This heat is transferred to the

Fig. 7. Keyhole from the FE simulation.

 S.A. Tsirkas et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 134 (2003) 59±69 65

Table 2
Welding cases

Case Laser parameters Number of Specimen

experiments dimensions (mm)
Power (W) Velocity (mm/min) Focus point

1 2000 300 0 8 150  300  4

2 1450 100 0 4 150  300  4
3 3000 200 0 6 150  300  6

metal by conduction and convection. A part of this heat edge, as shown in Fig. 5(a). For the measurement of the
energy is lost by free convection and radiation. The heat loss distortions, two linear voltage displacement transducers
was implemented into the FE code by developing a FOR- (LVDTs) devices were used, as shown in Fig. 5(b). The
TRAN subroutine. The heat loss by free convection follows LVDTs were located at the bottom surface of the free plate,
Newton's law, where the coef®cient of convective heat as shown in Fig. 6. The signals of the LVDTs were converted
transfer was assumed to vary with both temperature and using an analogue to digital converter (DATA LOGER)
orientation of the boundary connected with a PC.
A number of tests for three different sets of welding
kNu parameters (laser power and speed) were performed. The
qc ˆ …T Ta †
L values of the welding parameters used and the de®nition of
where k is the thermal conductivity of the material, L the each test case are shown in Table 2. After welding, optical
characteristic length of the plate (or surface), Ta the ambient
temperature, and Nu the Nusselt number de®ned by
1 1
Nu ˆ 5:67Pr 3 Gr3
where Pr is the Prandtl number and Gr is the Grashof
number, both of them being functions of ambient air proper-
ties and temperature differences between the surface and the
environment.
Heat loss due to thermal radiation between the weldments
and environment are important when the temperature dif-
ference is high. This radiation was modelled by the standard
Stefan±Boltzman relation

qr ˆ es…T 4 Ta4 †
where e is the heat emissivity and s is the Stefan±Boltzman
constant. Radiation is assumed from the surface to the
surroundings. Prior to welding the material is assumed to
be at room temperature.

3. Experimental investigation

For the laser welding experiments shipbuilding steel

AH36 was used with chemical composition shown in
Table 1. Square plates were used with 150 mm length and
thicknesses of 4 and 6 mm. The specimens were ®nely
milled on the welding side in order to reduce the gap
between the welded pieces. Then they were cleaned using
sandblasting on the top and bottom surfaces in order to
maximise the energy absorbed. A CO2 laser with a max-
imum power of 3 kW was used.
Special attention was given to the alignment of the work
pieces and the proper contact of the welding surfaces before
welding. During the laser welding progress inert gas ``He'' Fig. 8. Weld pool from experimental investigation (a), and FE simulation
was used. One of the welded plates was clamped on one (b).
66 S.A. Tsirkas et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 134 (2003) 59±69
microscopy and metallography were used to observe the
fused zone and measure the weld pool dimensions. The
metallographical investigation was conducted using small
specimens cut from the welding area of the work pieces for
all cases examined. The specimens were embedded in a resin
matrix and grinded using LaboPol-21 Struers equipment
with 320±1000 grid disks. Finally they were polished using
LaboPol-5 Struers equipment and were exposed to an appro-
priate Nital solution for metallography of steels.
4. Results and discussion
Using the geometry, the mesh and the heat ¯ux dis-
tribution model described above and the geometrical para-
meters of the welded pool that were measured from the
metallographical investigation, the keyhole size and shape
was ®rst modelled. The keyhole from the FE analysis for
one of the cases is shown in Fig. 7. Fig. 8(a) and (b) show
the weld pool as measured and as modelled in the code,
respectively.
Fig. 9. Temperature distribution during welding process at three different times (a±c), and during the cooling phase (d).
Another important aspect of laser welding modelling is
the mesh density, especially along the weld line and the
HAZ. This is mainly due to the very small size of the
keyhole. A number of convergence tests were conducted
in order to select the appropriate number of elements
speci®cally in the area close to the weld line and through
the thickness. More speci®cally geometries with four, ®ve
and six elements through the thickness were tested for
specimens with 4 mm thickness and six, seven and eight
elements through the thickness for specimens with 6 mm
thickness. It was decided to use four elements for the 4 mm
thick plate and six elements for the 6 mm thick plate since
this mesh required reasonable convergence and solution
time with no signi®cant loss of accuracy.
In the next step the thermal analysis was conducted.
Fig. 9(a)±(d) show the temperature distribution on the
welding parts at four different times during the process.
The ®gures show clearly the large temperature gradients at
the area close to the laser beam and also indicate the cooling
of the workpieces away from the heat source. Fig. 9(d)
shows the temperature distribution at the last step of heating,
 S.A. Tsirkas et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 134 (2003) 59±69 67

which will be followed by a number of steps simulating the Table 3

cooling stage. The temperature ®elds at the various time Theoretical and experimental distortion values (mm)
steps are then used as an input to the mechanical analysis. Model Experimental Deviation
Fig. 10 shows the changes of the workpiece shape during average (%)
welding. It is observed that at the beginning of welding the Case 1 LVDT 1 1475 1697 13.1
displacements are nonuniform and the workpiece is distorted LVDT 2 429 384 10.5
more at the side of the laser entry. However, at the end of the Case 2 LVDT 1 336 318 5.4
welding process (Fig. 10(c)) and especially after cooling LVDT 2 197 178 9.6
(Fig. 10(d)), the distortions become more uniform and their
Case 3 LVDT 1 3113 3282 5.2
distribution is almost linear from the weld line to the free LVDT 2 377 366 2.9
edge of the workpieces.
In order to compare these results with the experimental
measurements, the displacements of the points that corre-
spond to the position of the LVDTs (Fig. 6) were found. The deviation was 308 mm with an average value of 1697 mm.
comparison is shown in Fig. 11(a)±(c) for the three cases The model prediction was 1475 mm, which falls into the
examined. The comparison between the ®nite element pre- range of 1697  308 mm. Even though the distortions eval-
dictions and the average measured distortions are shown in uated using the model are very close to the experimental
Table 3. It is clear that the model can predict accurately the measurements, a number of factors, if included in the model,
distortions of the weld parts. The maximum deviation was can increase the accuracy of the predictions. These factors
13%, which is less than the scatter observed in testing. It include: the experimental measurement of the power
should be noted that even for case with the maximum scatter absorbed, better idealisation of the clamping and the inclu-
of the experiments (i.e. case 1, LVDT 1) the standard sion of gravity effects.

Fig. 10. Deformed shape of the weld pieces at four different times (10).
68 S.A. Tsirkas et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 134 (2003) 59±69

close to the weld line, comparable to the laser beam size

(<1 mm), the meshing of a real structure (several meters in
dimension) will lead to unrealistic computing time. To solve
this problem, the model can be used in a local±global
scheme to evaluate the distortions of real engineering parts.
This work is currently conducted.

5. Conclusions

A three-dimensional ®nite element model has been devel-

oped to simulate the laser welding process and predict the ®nal
distortions of a butt-joint specimen. The ®nite element calcu-
lations were performed using the SYSWELD FE code, which
takes into account thermal, metallurgical and mechanical
behaviour. Unlike other three-dimensional analyses, the cur-
rent work takes into account metallurgical transformations
using the temperature dependent material properties and the
CCT diagram and considers a moving heat source in a conical
shape. A number of welding experiments were conducted to
verify the model. Good agreement was obtained between
calculated distortions and experimental results.

Acknowledgements

The major part of this work was conducted in the frame of

the programme ``Integration Design Environment and
Numerical Analysis of Production Processes'' (D-SIGN).
The ®nancial support of the European Union under contract
BRPR-CT98-0758 is gratefully acknowledged.

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