An empirical formulation for predicting welding-induced biaxial compressive residual stresses on steel stiffened plate structures and its application to thermal plate buckling prevention

The aim of this paper is to derive an empirical formulation for predicting welding-induced biaxial compressive residual stresses in welded steel plate panels. A test database for full-scale models of welded steel plate structures is developed. Elastic-plastic finite element method solutions, associated with thermal stresses in welded steel plate panels, are also developed. The proposed formula is derived by a curve fitting of the databases obtained from both full-scale measurements and numerical computations as a function of plate thickness and weld leg length. The paper demonstrates an applied example of the derived formulations to prevent the thermal buckling of thin steel plate panels that occurs during the welding process