Modelling of the Melt Pool Behaviour during a Pulsed Tig Welding Operation in a Narrow Groove

Arc welding is one of the main processes for assembling metal components in the nuclear industry. To guarantee the quality of the welded assemblies and to predict the characteristics of the weld, it is necessary to master the welding process and have a thorough understanding of the interactions within the melt pool.

To this end, the objective of this work is to develop a transient numerical model allowing for the prediction of the behaviour of the melted zone during current pulsation in reasonable computational times. The relevant industrial application in this study is the welding of a narrow groove gap of a stainless steel pipe. The welding process used is pulsed TIG and different synergies are studied. In this work, numerical simulation is used as a predictive analysis tool providing data that complete the experimental ones. Knowing that the predictive aspect of the simulations depends on the modelling choices, it is necessary to consider the main physical phenomena governing the melt pool (thermal transfers, fluid flow, electromagnetism) and to model the mass feeding process using the Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) method. The development of the magneto-thermohydraulic model with material supply is carried out using the Comsol Multiphysics^® software