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Residual stresses and thermal distortion are a common phenomenon observed in any welding method. This is a result of non-uniform stresses generated due to highly localized heating at the joint edges, which fuses the base material and leads to considerable amount of changes in mechanical properties. Thus, it is very important to evaluate these effects in any welded structural members before designing for actual loading condition. Therefore, accurate prediction of these stresses and distortion is of critical importance to ensure the in-service structural integrity of welded structures. The recent advancement in Computational simulation and numerical techniques helps in evaluating the weld distortion and residual stresses. The moving heat flux approach and Element birth/death method makes it easier to analyze the weld distortion. This is done with the use of ANSYS® Commercial FE software.

In the automotive industry many components face fatigue failure due to prolonged vibrations. This is commonly known as Vibration Induced Fatigue (VIF). There are two approaches to evaluate this; time & frequency domain. A straight forward and widely used method is the rainflow counting technique in the time domain. This counting algorithm is readily available and, apart from the time history, it needs only one variable input (the number of stress ranges). In case of high cycle fatigue, longer time histories are required for a statistically representative fatigue estimate, which makes the time domain approach consume large amounts of time and resources. This shifts our interest towards frequency domain methods. In the frequency domain, Dirlik's method is proven to be robust and gives closer results to the time domain.