Weld Bench
Strike a virtual arc and watch the heat-affected zone form, with every number tied to published welding formulas.
Role: Independent DotCraft experiment: research, calculations, 3D and interface.
The idea / The process
Why a bench
The numbers behind a weld are well known and easy to look up: heat input, cooling time, carbon equivalents, the hardness next to the bead. What is hard to get is a feel for how they move together. Weld Bench puts a plate in front of you and lets you change the procedure and watch the result.
What it does
Bench 1 runs a moving heat source over two steel plates and paints each point with the hottest temperature it reached, so the heat-affected zone appears on the plate and in a cross-section. Bench 2 places a dissimilar or stainless joint on a Schaeffler diagram, with dilution between the base metals and the filler.
Limits
Nominal compositions, constant thermal properties, a single pass and a thick-plate model. The Schaeffler boundaries are a simplified tracing. These are teaching estimates, not a welding procedure.