Determination of welding residual stresses by inverse approach with eigenstrain formulations of boundary integral equation

Based on the concept of eigenstrain, a straightforward computational model of the inverse approach is proposed for determining the residual stress field induced by welding using the eigenstrain formulations of boundary integral equations. The eigenstrains are approximately expressed in terms of low-order polynomials in the local area around welded zones. The domain integrals with polynomial eigenstrains are transformed into the boundary integrals to preserve the favourable features of the boundary-only discretization in the process of numerical solutions. The sensitivity matrices in the inverse approach for evaluating the eigenstrain fields are constructed by either the measured deformations (displacements) on the boundary or the measured stresses in the domain after welding over a number of selected measuring points, or by both the measured information. It shows from the numerical examples that the results of residual stresses from deformation measurements are always better than those from stress measurements but they are sensitive to the noises from experiments. The results from stress measurements can be improved by introducing a few deformation measuring points while reducing the number of points for stress measuring to reduce the cost since the measurement of deformation is easier than that of stresses in practice.