This work presents an analysis of the thermal influence of the heat transfer by convection and radiation during GTA (gas tungsten arc) welding process. The authors’ in-house C++ previously-developed code was modified to calculate the amount of heat transfer by convection and radiation. In this software, an iterative Broydon-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) inverse method was applied to estimate the amount of heat delivered to the plate when the appropriate sensitivity criteria were defined. The methodology was validated by accomplishing lab-controlled experiments on stainless steel AISI 304L and aluminum 6065 T5 plates. Due to some experimental singularities, the forced thermal convection induced by the electromagnetic field and thermal-capillary force were disregarded. Significant examples of these singularities are the relatively small weld bead when compared to the sample size and the reduced time of the welding process. In order to evaluate the local Nusselt number, empirical correlations for flat plates were used. The thermal emission was a dominant cooling effect on the aluminum cooling. However, it did not present the same behavior as the stainless steel samples. The study found that the heat losses by convection and radiation of the weld pool do not affect the cooling process significantly.

Thermal conductivity, λ, and volumetric heat capacity, ρc_p, variables that depend on temperature were simultaneously estimated in a diverse technique applied to AISI 1045 and AISI 304 samples. Two distinctive intensities of heat flux were imposed to provide a more accurate simultaneous estimation in the same experiment. A constant heat flux was imposed on the upper surface of the sample while the temperature was measured on the opposite insulated surface. The sensitivity coefficients were analyzed to provide the thermal property estimation. The Broydon-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) optimization technique was applied to minimize an objective function. The squared difference objective function of the numerical and experimental temperatures was defined considering the error generated by the contact resistance. The temperature was numerically calculated by using the finite difference method. In addition, the reliability of the results was assured by an uncertainty analysis. Results showing a difference lower than 7% were obtained for λ and ρc_p, and the uncertainty values were above 5%.