SIMULATION-MEASUREMENT INVERSION OF ENVIRONMENT PARAMETERS DURING WELDING

The manual selection of environment parameters during welding simulation will bring a signifi- cant error to the simulation result of welding temperature field. By a combination of finite ele- ment method (FEM) and infrared thermography, these environment parameters were inversed mathematically in place of previous manual selection. First, FEM model of the welding process was constructed, and the temperature field was computed with initial environment parameters. Then, a real welding process was conducted and the temperature field was measured by in- frared thermography. Last, the simulation and measurement results were compared, and the en- vironment parameters were adjusted continuously with the genetic algorithm (GA) until the sim- ulation matched the measurement best. Parameters according to the best-matched simulation re- sults were considered as the most appropriate parameters.