Numerical Solution of Thermal Phenomena in Welding Problems

We present a novel finite element method to solve the thermal variables in welding problems. The mathematical model is based on the enthalpy formulation of the energy conservation law, which is simultaneously valid for the solid, liquid, and mushy regions. Both isothermal and non-isothermal melting models are considered to relate the enthalpy with the temperature. Quadratic triangular elements with local anisotropic mesh adaptation are employed for the space discretization of the governing equation, and a second-order backward differentiation formula is employed for the time discretization. The resulting non-linear discretized system is solved with a simple Newton algorithm with two versions: the θ -Newton algorithm, which considers the temperature as the main unknown variable, as in most works in the literature, and the h -Newton algorithm, which considers the enthalpy, which is the main novelty of the present work. Then, we show via numerical experiments that the h -Newton method is robust and converges well to the solution, both for isothermal and non-isothermal melting. However, the θ -method can only be applied to the case of non-isothermal melting and converges only for a sufficiently large melting temperature range or sufficiently small time step. Numerical experiments also confirm that the method is able to adequately capture the discontinuities or sharp variations in the solution without the need for any kind of numerical dissipation.