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The possibility to manage stress and strain in hardened parts might be beneficial for a number of inductionhardening applications. The most important of these benefits are the improvement of fatigue strength, avoidance of cracks, and minimization of distortion. An appropriate and powerful way to take the stress and strain into account during the development of a process is to make use of computer simulations. In-house developed and commercial software packages have been coupled to incorporate the electromagnetic task into the calculations. The simulations have been performed followed by analysis of the results. The influences of two different values of quenching intensity, strength of initial material structure, strength of austenite, surface power density-frequency-time combination, and workpiece diameter on the residual stress are studied. The influence of quenching intensity is confirmed by the series of experiments representing the external hardening of a cylinder with eight variations of quenching intensity. Measured by x-rays, the values of surface tangential stress are used as a dataset for verification of the model being used for analyses.

Purpose Quality of the weld joint produced by high-frequency induction (HFI) welding of steel tubes is attributed to a number of process parameters. There are several important process parameters such as the speed of the welding line, the angle of the approaching strip edges, the physical configuration of the induction coil, impeder, formed steel strip and weld rolls with respect to each other, the pressure of the weld rolls and frequency of the high-frequency current in the induction coil. The purpose of this paper is to develop a 3D model of tube welding process that incorporates realistic material properties and movement of the strip. Design/methodology/approach 3D numerical simulation by the finite element method (FEM) can be used to understand the influence of these process parameters. In this study, the authors have developed a quasi-steady model along with the coupling of electromagnetic and thermal model and incorporation of non-linear electromagnetic and thermal material properties. Findings In this study, 3D FEM model has been established which gives results in accordance with previously published work on induction tube welding. The effect of the Vee-angle and frequency on the temperature profile created in the strip edge during the electromagnetic heating is studied. Practical implications The authors are now able to simulate the induction tube welding process at a more reasonable computational cost enabling an analysis of the process. Originality/value A 3D model has been developed for induction tube welding. A non-linearly coupled system of Maxwell’s electromagnetic equation and the heat equation is implemented using the fixed point iteration method. The model also takes into account non-linear magnetic and thermal material properties. Adaptive remeshing is implemented to optimise mesh size for the electrical skin depth of induced current in the strip. The model also accounts for the high welding-line speeds which influence the mode of heat transfer in the strip.

Flux2D commercial software together with a Gleeble thermomechanical simulator has been employed to numerically and physically simulate the material properties profile of an induction hardened slurry transportation pipe made of a recently developed 0.4 wt.% C, Nb-microalloyed steel. After calculating the thermal history of a 400 mm diameter, 10 mm thick pipe at various positions through the thickness, different heating and cooling paths were physically simulated using the Gleeble machine to predict the through-thickness material microstructure and hardness profiles. The results showed that by coupling a phase transformation model considering the effect of heating rate on the austenite transformation temperatures which allows calculations for arbitrary cooling paths with calculated induction heating and quenching thermal cycles, it has been possible to design induction hardening parameters for a slurry transport pipe material.