Implementation of a 3D solver for electric arc welding, coupling fluid mechanics with electromagnetics

Abstract

Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Mauritius, 11-13 July, 2011.

This paper describes the implementation of a 3D numerical solver for electric arc welding, where the fluid mechanics of the shielding gas is strongly influenced by the electromagnetic fields. The implementation is done in the OpenFOAM-1.6.x OpenSource Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool (www.openfoam.com). OpenFOAM is basically a general library of C++ classes for numerical simulation of continuum mechanic problems, but it is mainly used in CFD. The basics of high-level programming in OpenFOAM is described briefly, while the main components of the implementation done in the present work are described in high detail. The implementation is validated against an analytical solution of the electromagnetic field of an infinite electrically conducting rod, and against an experimental study of GTAW (Gas Tungsten Arc Welding). The numerical results agree very well with both the analytical and experimental results. A grid-dependency study has been made for the GTAW case, showing that the main features of the presented solutions are independent of the mesh size.