An experimental study on residual stresses of high strength steel box columns

As high strength steel (HSS) box columns are often fabricated by welding of steel plates together, welding process during fabrication inevitably introduces residual stresses in the columns and affects their strengths. Hence, a good understanding of the influence of the welding process on the residual stresses of HSS built-up box column is important for the design of such columns. In this study, an experimental investigation to investigate the effects of welding process on the residual stress distributions of HSS built-up box columns was carried out. Two groups of identical specimens fabricated by flux-cored arc welding and submerged arc welding were studied. The influence of different welding methods was investigated by employing the ASTM hole-drilling method to measure the residual stress distributions. Furthermore, a study was also conducted to evaluate the effects of different heat treatment procedures on the magnitude and distributions of the final residual stresses produced

Numerical investigation of high-strength built-up box columns

As high-strength steel box columns are usually fabricated by welding steel plates together, the welding process inevitably introduces residual stress and geometric imperfections and may affect their compressive strength. A detailed numerical investigation was conducted to study the behaviour of high-strength steel built-up box columns under compression. The welding processes were first simulated by a three-dimensional fully coupled thermal–mechanical modelling procedure using the general-propose finite-element package Abaqus. The residual stress distributions in the columns generated by different welding processes were determined. The column strengths under compression were then modelled by incorporating both the computed residual stress and the initial geometrical imperfections of the column as predefined input fields. Furthermore, the effects of different welding processes and heat treatment methods on built-up box column strength were investigated and discussed

A numerical study on residual stress of high strength steel box column

As high strength steel (HSS) with yield stress of at least 690 MPa is still essentially only available in plate form, HSS box columns have to be “built-up” from plates by welding. During the welding process, residual stress is inevitably generated and could affect the column strength. In this study, a numerical investigation on the welding residual stress distributions of HSS built-up box column is carried out. Two finite element modelling packages, namely the general-purpose package ABAQUS and the welding-function-specific package SYSWELD are employed to simulate the welding and post weld heat treatment process of the column. The predicted results obtained were then validated with test data. In order to investigate the effects of different welding methods, two groups of models corresponding to flux-cored arc welding and submerged arc welding were analyzed. Furthermore, the effects of different heating treatment procedures are also simulated and compared