Mesh Generation Method for Welding Deformation Analysis based on Lightweight Model

In ships and offshore plants, lightweight models are widely used for all processes, including design, procurement, construction, and operation. These models are mainly composed of triangular elements, thus minimizing the file size and increasing the visibility. The welding process is the most time-consuming and expensive process in the ship and plant construction. During this process, welding deformation causes dimensional quality problems. A finite element analysis (FEA) is widely used to prevent these problems. In this paper, we propose a mesh generation method to estimate welding deformation based on a lightweight model. The lightweight model has no information about the welding line because this model is only used for visualization purposes. Boundary curves are restored from the triangle elements. If a boundary curve lies on another face, it is classified as a welding line. Then, a trimmed polygon surface is created including welding lines, and a quadrilateral mesh is generated using the domain decomposition method. This proposed method was tested on several models to demonstrate the feasibility.