ABSTRACT The residual stresses generated due to welding in pressure components may have several harmful effects such as decrease in the resistance to cycling load and corrosive environments. The analysis of the welding process has been developed extensively in 2D and 3D. The element movement technique has been shown to be very effective in simulating the filler material deposition leading to a reduction in the analysis time. However, when attempted for wider fields of applications, it had some limitations, especially when moving the elements towards the base-plate. In this paper, the element interaction technique is introduced utilizing the concepts of both the element movement and element birth techniques. The new technique is verified versus the currently developed procedures. In this technique, the elements of the weld pool are held in place in contact with the elements of the base-plate and the interaction is made to be a function of time. This gave several flexibilities in modeling the welding process. Hence, the technique is then used to analyze simple fillet welding of a plate and circumferential butt-welding of a pipe. INTRODUCTION The residual stresses generated during welding vary with the change in the welding parameters depending on the procedure of the joining process. Many researches have been done to investigate the residual stress for specific problem. Due to the complexity of the different applications, several assumptions and approximations, such as reducing the model from 3D to 2D, are made to facilitate the analysis. These approximations help mainly in reducing modeling efforts and analysis time. The element birth technique has been used in simulating metal deposition in both 3D and 2D models. Brown and Song [1] have used the technique in an axisymmetric simulation of a fillet-weld of ringstiffened cylinder. Wilkening and Snow [2] have also solved an axisymmetric simulation of a two-pass butt-weld of a cylinder using the element birth technique. Also, for a plate, they assumed that the through thickness variation of the residual stress is insignificant, so they modeled a single-pass butt-weld of plate using 2D plane model of the plate. Bouchard et a
