In order to assess welds, specific stress components are needed. In general these cannot be extracted from the FE-model directly and therefore have to be determined by the engineer. The stress components required are deduced by the orientation of the local weld coordinate systems and a transformation of the original stress components into that coordinate system.

These work steps are time consuming, since it has to be done for every weld-element and load case or analysis step. Therefore WeldFEM performs all of the mentioned work steps for the user. In the first place it extracts the required stress components of the weld-elements to assess. Afterwards WeldFEM collects information about the elemental coordinate system of every weld-element and performs the transformation of the stress components of each element correctly.