Automatically Lay Out And Evaluate Weld Seams

Welded connections are the most frequently used joining method for permanent connections in many industrial sectors. Examples can be found in mechanical and plant engineering, shipbuilding or in the automotive industry, where numerous resistance welding points, laser welds and fusion welded joints are used in vehicle bodies. As a material connection process, welded connections are particularly suitable for the transmission of forces, bending and torsional moments and offer designers an inexpensive process for connecting small components to components with the largest dimensions. The connection method enables an economical,material-efficient lightweight design and also offers great design freedom.

Picture gallery

Picture gallery with 8 pictures

Characterized by manual processes

However, the design of welded joints presents designers with major challenges, since on the one hand there is often a large number of welded connections required and on the other hand the positioning and dimensioning of the welded connections directly affects the rigidity, weight and service life of the product. For this reason, there are corresponding guidelines in some areas (e.g. from DVS, FKM, Eurocode, …) that support the designer in the design of the welded connections. In addition, a detailed weld seam assessment or weld seam certification is mandatory in various product categories. In many companies, the design and calculation of welded joints is characterized by manual processes, which makes this workflow time-consuming, cost-intensive and prone to errors.For this reason, the companies strive to use automated procedures with which both the calculation step and the weld seam qualification can be designed to be user-friendly.

Evaluate welds automatically

Altair Engineering recently released the Weld Certification Director (WCD), which addresses these challenges. It offers a standardized, simplified and automated process for verifying weld seams in an FE model, in accordance with the required regulation. Embedded in Hyperworks, it enables the user to see all weld seams and their status at a glance. The open architecture, the wide range of configuration options as well as the built-in options for automation and customization enable the Weld Certification Director to be seamlessly embedded in customer-specific environments or processes. Altair Engineering has had the tool and the entire process together with customers, including Stadler, Grimme, Bombardier Transportation,Deutsche Bahn and Amazon, specified and developed.

Focus on interpretation of results

Altair's WCD is a combination of basic software with customer-specific additions and integrated services that enable the engineer to drastically reduce the time for the identification and analysis of the mechanical properties of the weld seams. The software is fully integrated into Altair's Hyperworks environment, providing an automated approach to checking weld stress and identifying critical areas early in the development process. With the WCD, the engineers can concentrate on interpreting the results instead of having to deal with complex data processing, including data preparation, extraction, conversion and evaluation, which can include several thousand welds.The solution automatically identifies welds from different connection types and enables engineers to quickly and completely inspect all welds in a structure. These verifications can be performed based on standard guidelines or customer-specific methods.

Content of the article:

• Page 1: Automatically lay out and evaluate weld seams
• Page 2: Working with the WCD
• Page 3: The WCD in practice

> Next page