In Pressurized Water Reactors, most of heavy components and pipes have a large thickness and their manufacturing processes often require multi-pass welding. Despite the stiffness of these components, the distortion issue may be important for operational requirements (e.g. misalignment) or controllability reasons (Non Destructive Examinations have to be achievable, therefore ovalization should be limited). These requirements may be difficult to achieve by simply adjusting welding processes. Indeed because of the complexity of mechanisms involved during a welding operation and the high number of influencing parameters, this process is still essentially based on the experience of the welder. Furthermore the experimental estimation of the stress and distortion level in the component remains a difficult task that is subject to errors even if techniques are currently improved to become more accurate. These are the reasons why AREVA has put a large effort to improve welding numerical simulations, in order to have a better understanding of the involved physical phenomena and also to predict the residual state through the structure. Computational welding mechanics is used to qualify the manufacturing processes in the very early phase of the welded component design. Within the framework of a R&D program whose main objective was to improve tools for the numerical simulation of welding regarding industrial needs, AREVA has decided to validate new methodologies based on 3D computation by comparison with measurements. For this validation task the chosen industrial demonstrator was a Control Rod Drive Mechanism (CRDM) Nozzle with a J-groove attachment weld to the vessel head. For such an application, operations of post-joining straightening have to be limited, if not prohibited, because of their cost or the impossibility to use them in front of a steel giant. The control of distortion during welding operations is a key issue for which simulation can be of great help. Regarding distortion issues, both accurate metal deposit sequence modeling and respect of the real welding parameters are mandatory, especially for multi-pass operation on such a complex geometry.
The aim of this paper is to present the simulation of the distortion of a peripheral adapter J-groove attachment weld mock-up. This new full 3D simulation improves the result of the previous one based on lumped pass deposits. It is the result of a fruitful collaboration between AREVA and ESI-Group.