Numerical Simulation of Friction Stir Welding by an Efficient 3D Updated Lagrangian Technique

Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is a welding technique which since its invention in 1991 is of great interest to the industry for its many advantages. Despite being widely used, its physical foundations and its relation to the technological parameters of the process are not known in detail. Numerical simulations are a powerful tool to achieve a greater understanding of the physics of the problem. Although several approaches can be found in the literature for FSW, all of them present different limitations that restrict their applicability to the industry. This paper presents a new solution strategy that combines a meshless method, the Natural Element Method (NEM), with a solution separated representation making use of the Proper Generalized Decomposition (PGD), for creating a new powerful updated-Lagrangian method for addressing the 3D model while maintaining a 2D computational complexity.