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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the effect of material hardening model and lump-pass method on the thermal-elastic-plastic (TEP) finite element (FE) simulation of residual stress induced by multi-pass welding of materials with cyclic plasticity.

Nickel-base alloy and stainless steel, which are used in J-type weld for manufacturing the nuclear reactor pressure head, can easily harden during multi-pass welding. The J-weld welding experiment is carried out and the temperature cycle and residual stress are measured to validate the TEP simulation. Thermal-mechanical sequence coupling method is employed to get the welding residual stress. The lumped-pass model and pass-by-pass FE model are built and two materials hardening models, kinematic hardening model and mixed hardening model, are adopted during the simulations. The effects of material hardening models and lumped-pass method on the residual stress in J-weld are distinguished.

Based on the kinematic hardening model, the stresses simulated with the lumped-pass FE model are almost consistent with those obtained by the pass-by-pass FE model; while with the mixed hardening material model, the lumped-pass method has great effect on the simulated stress.

A computation with mixed isotropic-kinematic material seems not to be the appropriate solution when using the lumped-pass method to save the computation time.

In the simulation of multi-pass welding residual stress involved in materials with cyclic plasticity, the material hardening model should be carefully considered. The kinematic hardening model with lump-pass FE model can be used to get better simulation results with less computation time. The results give a direction for welding residual stress simulation for the large structure such as the reactor pressure vessel.