Expand Capabilities
Identify optimized welding parameters that solve your manufacturing challenges.
Improve Repeatability
Increase production yield rates by ensuring quality in your welding process.
Ease of Use
Provide powerful simulation tools to your engineers without the need of modeling experience or code-heavy customizations.
FLOW-3D WELD is a powerful simulation tool for industrial precision welding with accurate modeling of material behaviors during melting and solidification. Providing insights into joining complex, multi-alloy parts, FLOW-3D WELD enables engineers to predict critical defects and optimize process parameters for improved quality and productivity.
Hairpin Laser Welding
Experimental images courtesy Prof. Ali Gökhan Demir, Politecnico di Milano
Leverage simulations to gain insight into your process, detect defects, and alter process parameters to improve quality. FLOW-3D WELD focuses on where defects originate – the melt pool. Identification of melt pool instabilities and their effect on solidified geometry helps engineers find process sensitivities and develop weld schedules that deliver repeatable quality.
Solve Production Issues
- Simulate existing welding processes and identify sources of defects and process sensitivities.
- Predict effects of varying welding recipes to improve joint quality while decreasing the cost and time spent running physical tests.
- Develop new weld schedules driven by CFD simulations for reduced production down time and risk of recurring quality issues.
Optimize Production
- Find optimal welding parameters using targeted optimization in FLOW-3D (x) to increase production without compromising joint quality.
- Perform sensitivity studies by varying process parameters such as power, speed, heat flux distribution, scan path, and material composition to identify parameters that can best optimize the process.
- Predict weld schedules that achieve specific part quality through defect mitigation, bead dimensions, surface finish, and thermal profiles.
Determine Manufacturing Requirements
- Use simulations to predict welding results at the bounds of your tolerance stack to ensure quality bonding, reduce the risk of assembly failures, and allow your engineers to develop requirements that result in successful production runs.
- Analyze the size and location of heat effected zones as well as thermal gradients and cooling rates to reduce probability of cracking.
- Meet electrical conductivity requirements in critical applications through predicted weld bead geometry and porosity levels.
Test innovations
- Develop process parameters for joining dissimilar materials, custom alloys, or new materials.
- Explore scan strategies for joining parts with varying surface geometry such as tailor welded blanks.
- Study the effects of updated machine integrations such as the use of beam shaping technologies, pulse lasers, or multi-laser equipment.
Solve Production Issues
- Simulate existing welding processes and identify sources of defects and process sensitivities.
- Predict effects of varying welding recipes to improve joint quality while decreasing the cost and time spent running physical tests.
- Develop new weld schedules driven by CFD simulations for reduced production down time and risk of recurring quality issues.
Optimize Production
- Find optimal welding parameters using targeted optimization in FLOW-3D (x) to increase production without compromising joint quality.
- Perform sensitivity studies by varying process parameters such as power, speed, heat flux distribution, scan path, and material composition to identify parameters that can best optimize the process.
- Predict weld schedules that achieve specific part quality through defect mitigation, bead dimensions, surface finish, and thermal profiles.
Determine Manufacturing Requirements
- Use simulations to predict welding results at the bounds of your tolerance stack to ensure quality bonding, reduce the risk of assembly failures, and allow your engineers to develop requirements that result in successful production runs.
- Analyze the size and location of heat effected zones as well as thermal gradients and cooling rates to reduce probability of cracking.
- Meet electrical conductivity requirements in critical applications through predicted weld bead geometry and porosity levels.
Test innovations
- Develop process parameters for joining dissimilar materials, custom alloys, or new materials.
- Explore scan strategies for joining parts with varying surface geometry such as tailor welded blanks.
- Study the effects of updated machine integrations such as the use of beam shaping technologies, pulse lasers, or multi-laser equipment.
FLOW-3D WELD offers solutions for a variety of challenges seen in precision welding.
Capture complex fluid flow and solidification during keyhole and conduction mode welding. Optimize weld schedules to improve joint quality, join dissimilar materials, increase production, and prevent critical defects such as porosity and cracking due to high thermal gradients and heat affected zones.
Simulate joining of dissimilar materials with accurate models accounting for the temperature dependent properties of each material. FLOW-3D WELD provides valuable insights into how variations in process parameters influence the inter-metallic layer and can lead to a reduction in porosity and crack propagation.
Utilize FLOW-3D WELD’s dynamic heat source options to model pulsed lasers and analyze their effect on your application. Identify optimal laser parameters and pulse durations to deliver precise heating in component sensitive areas or when joining dissimilar metals to avoid over mixing.
Analyze the effects of different scan strategies, laser powers, and heat flux distributions while accounting for additional forces and heat transfer from recoil pressure, shield gasses, and laser reflections. Improve melt pool stability and joint quality through wobbling strategies that deliver precision heating with smaller heat affected zones.
Import CAD files to simulate your brazing process while considering the geometric dimensions of the parts being joined. Analyze the resultant bead geometry and quality while altering your laser power, speed, and wire feed rate to determine your optimal welding conditions.
Simulate powder deposition with custom alloy definitions to understand effects of process parameters on coating quality. Optimize for desired surface finish and low heat affected zones when cladding onto sensitive components and maintaining tolerance stack requirements.
Simulate your soldering process to analyze the heat transfer around temperature sensitive components at the micro scale. Use FLOW-3D WELD to identify process parameters that result in high quality soldered joints while ensuring heat effected zones are not exceeding the maximum allowable temperatures.
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