Powerful analytical solution to heat flow problem in welding

This paper reviews different solutions to the heat flow problem in welding and compares them quantitatively to illustrate their applicability. The Rosenthal's and Nguyen's analytical solutions along with finite element method were selected to compare their applicability with respect to computational costs and accuracy. According to the result, analytical solutions suffer lack of accuracy and finite element method is often too costly. To overcome the shortcomings of those conventional methods, a new method is proposed based on finding an adaptive function which can generally model the temperature field of the work-piece. The dimension of the weld pool together with the temperature of some arbitrary points are used to determine the parameters of the adaptive function. The proposed method thus requires no knowledge about the thermo-physical properties of the material and the heat source boundary conditions which are difficult to determine. The comparison of the novel approach with other methods shows a relatively low computation time plus high accuracy with an overall relative error of less than 5%.