Evaluation of residual stress distribution in austenitic stainless steel pipe butt-welded joint

This paper reports measured and estimated results of residual stress distributions of butt-welded austenitic stainless steel pipe in order to improve estimation accuracy of welding residual stress. Neutron diffraction and strain gauge method were employed for the measurement of the welding residual stress and its detailed distributions on inner and outer surface of the pipe as well as the distributions within the pipe wall were obtained. Finite element method was employed for the estimation. Transient and residual stresses in 3D butt-welded joint model were computed by employing Iterative Substructure Method and also commercial FEM code ABAQUS for a reference. The measured and estimated distributions presented typical characteristic of straight butt-welded pipe which had decreasing trend along the axial direction and bending type distributions through wall of the pipe. Both results were compared and the accuracy of measurement and estimation was discussed. (author)