Publications

We are developing the capability to track material changes through numerous possible steps of the manufacturing process, such as forging, machining, and welding. In this work, experimental and modeling results are presented for a multiple-step process in which an ingot of stainless steel 304L is forged at high temperature, then machined into a thin slice, and finally subjected to an autogenous GTA weld. The predictions of temperature, yield stress, and recrystallized volume fraction are compared to experimental results.

In forged, welded, and machined components, residual stresses can form during the fabrication process. These residual stresses can significantly alter the fatigue and fracture properties compared to an equivalent component containing no residual stress. When performing lifetime assessment, the residual stress state must be incorporated into the analysis to most accurately reflect the initial condition of the component. The focus of this work is to present the computational and experimental tools that we are developing to predict and measure the residual stresses in stainless steel for use in pressure vessels. The contour method was used to measure the residual stress in stainless steel forgings. These results are compared to the residual stresses predicted using coupled thermo-mechanical simulations that track the evolution of microstructure, strength and residual stress during processing.

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Exomerge is a lightweight Python module for reading, manipulating and writing data within ExodusII files. It is built upon a Python wrapper around the ExodusII API functions. This module, the Python wrapper, and the ExodusII libraries are available as part of the standard SIERRA installation.

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Performing coupled thermomechanical simulations is becoming an increasingly important aspect of nuclear weapon (NW) safety assessments in abnormal thermal environments. While such capabilities exist in SIERRA, they have thus far been used only in a limited sense to investigate NW safety themes. An important limiting factor is the difficulty associated with developing geometries and meshes appropriate for both thermal and mechanical finite element models, which has limited thermomechanical analysis to simplified configurations. This work addresses the issue of how to perform coupled analyses on models where the underlying geometries and associated meshes are different and tailored to their relevant physics. Such an approach will reduce the model building effort and enable previously developed single-physics models to be leveraged in future coupled simulations. A combined-environment approach is presented in this report using SIERRA tools, with quantitative comparisons made between different options in SIERRA. This report summarizes efforts on running a coupled thermomechanical analysis using the SIERRA Arpeggio code.

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