Determination of the gross heat input in arc welding

A method to expurgate intrinsic errors from cryogenic calorimetric measurements is described. The sources of errors were identified and experimental procedures were devised to expurgate quantitatively the deviations from the true values, using extrapolation and linearization techniques. The methodology was applied to a case of MIG/MAG welding of carbon steel. The outcome of this approach represents the actual heat input (referred to here as gross heat input) and evidences that the commonly accepted conventional heat input measured by calorimetric methods represents only part of the heat input that is absorbed by the samples. It is expected that the gross heat input values can be successfully used in numerical simulations for better reliability in prediction models on welding.