Energy law preserving continuous finite element schemes for a gas metal arc welding system

Abstract

Abstract In this paper a modified continuous energy law was explored to investigate transport behavior in a gas metal arc welding (GMAW) system. The energy law equality at a discrete level for the GMAW system was derived by using the finite element scheme. The mass conservation and current density continuous equation with the penalty scheme was applied to improve the stability. According to the phase-field model coupled with the energy law preserving method, the GMAW model was discretized and a metal transfer process with a pulse current was simulated. It was found that the numerical solution agrees well with the data of the metal transfer process obtained by high-speed photography. Compared with the numerical solution of the volume of fluid model, which was widely studied in the GMAW system based on the finite element method Euler scheme, the energy law preserving method can provide better accuracy in predicting the shape evolution of the droplet and with a greater computing efficiency.