Experimental and numerical analysis of TIG-dressing applied to a steel weldment

Fatigue strength of welded joints is controlled above all by notch defects such as weld toe and weld root that act as stress concentrators. This is the reason why over the last years different post-weld fatigue improvement techniques have been developed with the main propose of reducing geometrical discontinuities. Among these, TIG-dressing is the most used because of its simplicity and effectiveness in lowering the residual stress concentration. By this process the weld toe is re-melted to provide a smoother transition between the plate and the weld crown and to beneficially modify the residual stress redistribution. However, because of the intrinsic difficulty to numerically simulate the TIG-dressing process due to the high coupling between fluid and mechanical analysis, the effects of a weld toe remelting in terms of residual stress redistribution is hardly quantified in literature. The present paper is aimed to analyse the influence of TIG-dressing process on metallurgical and mechanical properties of a steel T-joint. Finally, a numerical model, recently published in literature, was used to quantified the residual stress redistribution.