Numerical Simulation of Friction Stir Welding by Natural Element Methods

In this work we address the problem of numerically simulating the Friction Stir Welding process. Due to the special characteristics of this welding method (i.e., high speed of the rotating pin, very large deformations, etc.) finite element methods encounter several difficulties. Meshless methods somewhat alleviate this problems, allowing for an updated Lagrangian framework in the simulation. Accuracy is not affected by mesh distortion (and hence the name meshless), but the price to pay is the computational cost, higher than in the FEM. In this paper we will show some examples on the performance of the method.