Scientific paper ID 500 : 2011/2

Residual stress and deformations continue to be important issues in wagon building and are still subject to large amounts of research. Many manufacturers of transport equipment currently use submerged arc welding (SAW) as their welding process of choice. In this manuscript, the authors compare welds made by SAW with DC gas metal arc welding, pulsed gas metal arc welding, Fronius cold metal transfer (CMT), autogenous laser and laser hybrid welding on butt welds in 4 mm thick plate. Laser and laser hybrid welding were found to produce the lowest distortion. The paper seeks to understand the relationship between heat input, fusion area, measured distortion and the residual stress predicted from a simple numerical model, and the residual stresses validated with experimental data.