Welding Sequence Optimization of TA15 Airplane Wall Panels

TA15 airplane wall panels are used widely in aircraft manufacture, which consist of some reinforced ribs and a motherboard. Therefore, welding sequences of different reinforced ribs directly determine distortion and residual stress distributions of welding wall panels, and then affect the structure service performance. Therefore, it is important to get the optimistic sequence during manufacture processing of welding wall panels. This paper analyses and predicts regularities of distributions of residual distortion and stress under four kinds of different welding sequence namely, order welding sequence, head-tail welding, head-tail symmetry welding and center symmetry welding. Compared the distortion and residual stress of four kinds of sequences, it is obvious that the welding distortion is smaller and welding quality is better under head-tail symmetry welding sequence, and the order welding sequence is the worst. The simulated distortions are in good agreement with the experiments. So this study puts forward the best welding sequence when welding airplane wall panels, which adapt to any amounts of reinforced ribs welded with the motherboard.