5. A review. Outlook

Welding simulation is undergoing significant development in industry. Simulations are generally carried out using generalist finite element codes such as ANSYS, ABAQUS or MARC, or dedicated numerical welding simulation codes such as SYSWELD. General-purpose codes often have no specific welding modeling capabilities, but can be adapted via user subroutines (see [48] ).

As far as simulation results are concerned, the methods and models available today enable microstructure and residual stresses to be accurately determined, since these depend above all on the cold mechanical properties of the materials, which are generally fairly well known, and can be assessed using a local model of the weld, i.e. one of reasonable size (table