Residual stresses evolution during strip clad welding, post welding heat treatment and repair welding for a large pressure vessel

Abstract Strip clad welding is a key manufacturing process of large pressure vessel and repair welding was usually used to repair the defects of strip welded structure, which generates very complex residual stresses and have a great effect on structure integrity. Therefore, in this paper, the residual stress distributions and their evolutions during strip clad welding, post-welding heat treatment (PWHT) and repair welding of a large pressure vessel were investigated. A new strip cladding heat source model considering the magnetic pinch effect was proposed. The predicted welding pool size by the proposed heat source model has a good agreement with the experiment results. And the predicted residual stresses in every stage agree very well with those by indention measurement method. The residual stresses after strip clad welding along the through-thickness direction present tension-compression-tension distribution. The PWHT has little eliminating effect on tensile residual stress on cladding layer, and even worsens the discontinuity stress distributions across the interfaces between the clad metal and base metal. After repair welding, local detrimental tensile residual stresses were generated in the repaired zone. A new heat treatment method based on distinct temperature regulation is proposed, which has a good ability to eliminate the tensile stress of the cladding layer to compressive stress and has a good application in engineering.