Residual stress relief in MAG welded joints of dissimilar steels

This paper addresses the relief of residual stress in welded joints between austenitic and non-alloyed ferritic-pearlitic steels. A series of similar and dissimilar steel joints based on the 18G2A (ferritic-pearlitic) and 1H18N10T (austenitic) steels were produced, some of which were stress relieved by annealing and some by mechanical prestressing. For the as-welded and stress relieved test joints the residual stresses were measured by trepanning. To aid the interpretation of these results, 2D plane stress finite element analysis has been performed to simulate the residual stress relieving methods. Analysis of the results has shown that thermal stress relieving of welded joints between dissimilar steels is not effective and may even increase residual stresses, due to the considerable difference in thermal expansion of the joined steels. It was found that, for the loads imposed, the effectiveness of the mechanical stress relieving of dissimilar steel welded joints was much lower than that of similar steel joints