Investigation of numerical modelling of TIG welding of austenitic stainless steel (304L) Pramod Kumar a,c,⇑ , Rajesh Kumar b , Abdul Arif a , M. Veerababu a a Mechanical Engineering, Aditya College of Engineering and Technology, Surampalem, India b Mechanical Engineering, Aditya Engineering College, Surampalem, India c Mechanical Engineering, NIT Patna, India article info Article history: Received 17 February 2020 Received in revised form 16 March 2020 Accepted 18 March 2020 Available online xxxx Keywords: TIG welding Welding current 304L Temperature distribution FEM, peak temperature abstract Welding is one of the most commonly joining processes used in industry at widespread. Austenitic stain- less steel are application in fabrication pressure vessels. Thin sheets of 304L can be welded by pulsed Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) joining process. The current study investigates the numerical modelling of pulsed TIG welding of austenitic stainless steel using ANSY APDL. Double ellipsoidal heat source have been used for modelling the pulsed TIG welding. The objective of the present investigation is to study the effect of varying welding current on the temperature distribution curve. Temperature profile affects the microstructure, mechanical properties and the residual stresses developed in the welded joint during TIG welding. It has been observed that the peak temperature increases with increasing welding current. Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the First International conference on Advanced Lightweight Materials and Structures. 1. Introduction Welding is a method of fusion of two comparable or non- comparable metals, with or without pressure application and with or without filler metal use. Weldability of the material relies on multiple variables such as metallurgical modifications resulting from welding, changes in material hardness, in and around the weld, and the magnitude of the joint’s cracking inclination. Single or mixture of variables such as stress, heat and filler material used have been used to develop a variety of welding procedures so far. TIG welding is one of the most widely used joining process. Many researchers have explored the welding of austenitic stain- less steel. Lindgren et al. [1] studied the finite element method to predict the thermal and mechanical properties of the welded joints. They studied the Computational Welding Mechanics (CWM) which is commonly used numerical approach and reviewed modelling problems in heat input and material beha- viour. Lu et al. [2] studied the effect of deformation between the welding arc and weld pool using numerical simulation approach. They calculated the weld pool shape using dynamic coupling of welding arc and pool. Faraji et al. [3] studied the three dimensional numerical model using finite volume method for the simulation of heat transfer and fluid flow in hybrid TIG - laser welding. They observed that the hybrid welding results similar weld pool com- pared to laser welding process which is formed due to high heat input from the combination of TIG and laser heat. Kumar et al. [4] explored the numerical simulation of temperature distribution in laser welding of carbon steel St 37 to predict weld geometry and heating and cooling curve and validated the numerical results with good agreement. Dong et al. [5] studied the effect of active element oxygen and GTAW welding parameters namely speed, current and electrode gap on weld shape using a numerical approach. They observed that with low oxygen, low welding speed, welding cur- rent or small electrode gap will produce more welding D/W ratio. Gao et al. [6] studied the comparative analysis for joining of Ti6Al4V titanium alloy using Nd:YAG laser and TIG welding. They compared the residual distortion, weld pool geometry and mechanical properties of the two joining processes. They found that the LBW joining process has more strength of the weldment than TIG welding with higher ductility. Kumar et al. [7] investi- gated temperature distribution in laser welding of 304L austenitic stainless steel. They studied the effect of laser welding process parameters, namely, average beam power, welding speed, and laser spot diameter on weld bead geometry have been studied. Kumar et al. [8] studied a three-dimensional numerical model for the simulation of temperature profile and temperature gradient in similar and dissimilar laser welding of 304L and St37. Mousavi https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.03.544 2214-7853/Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the First International conference on Advanced Lightweight Materials and Structures. ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +917903406446. E-mail address: pramod.me14@nitp.ac.in (P. Kumar). Materials Today: Proceedings xxx (xxxx) xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Materials Today: Proceedings journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/matpr Please cite this article as: P. Kumar, R. Kumar, A. Arif et al., Investigation of numerical modelling of TIG welding of austenitic stainless steel (304L), Materi- als Today: Proceedings, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.03.544