  While the application of the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method for
the modeling of welding processes has become increasingly popular in recent
years, little is yet known about the quantitative predictive capability of this
method. We propose a novel SPH model for the simulation of the tungsten inert
gas (TIG) spot welding process and conduct a thorough comparison between our
SPH implementation and two Finite Element Method (FEM) based models. In order
to be able to quantitatively compare the results of our SPH simulation method
with grid based methods we additionally propose an improved particle to grid
interpolation method based on linear least-squares with an optional
hole-filling pass which accounts for missing particles. We show that SPH is
able to yield excellent results, especially given the observed deviations
between the investigated FEM methods and as such, we validate the accuracy of
the method for an industrially relevant engineering application.
