Measurement and modeling of residual stress in a welded Haynes® 25 cylinder

An experimental and simulation study of residual stresses was made in the vicinity of a gas tungsten arc weld, used to join a hemispherical end cap to a cylinder. The capped cylinder is used in a satellite application and was fabricated from a Co-based Haynes® 25 alloy. The cylinder was 34.7 mm in outer diameter and 3.3 mm in thickness. The experimental measurements were made by neutron diffraction and the simulation used the implicit Marc finite element code. The experimental resolution was limited to approximately 3 mm parallel to the axis of the cylinder (the weld was 6 mm in the same direction) and comparison over the same volume of the finite element prediction showed general agreement. Subject to the limited spatial resolution, the largest experimentally measured tensile residual stress was 180 MPa, located at the middle of the weld. However, the predictions suggest that there are regions in the weld where average tensile residual stresses as much as 400 MPa exist. One qualitative disparity between the model and the experiments was that the measurement included a larger degree of asymmetry on either side of the weld than predicted by the model.