Numerical Modeling of Transport Phenomena and Dendritic Growth in Laser Spot Conduction Welding of 304 Stainless Steel

A multiscale model is developed to investigate the heat/mass transport and dendrite growth in laser spot conduction welding. A macroscale transient model of heat transport and fluid flow is built to study the evolution of temperature and velocity field of the molten pool. The molten pool shape is calculated and matches well with the experimental result. On the microscale level, the dendritic growth of 304 stainless steel is simulated by a novel model that has coupled the cellular automata (CA) and phase field (PF) methods. The epitaxial growth is accurately identified by defining both the grain density and dendrite arm density at the fusion line. By applying the macroscale thermal history onto the microscale calculation domain, the microstructure evolution of the entire molten pool is simulated. The predicted microstructure achieves a good quantitative agreement with the experimental results. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4007101]