Hi,
ah, now it's clearer... Well, if you are going to simulate that with FEM, good luck, because you will face a quantity of challenges:
- build a model with crack-growth possibilities
- build a model with birth-and-death possibilities
- get an extremely detailed/precise constitutive law for both the base material and the welding material, taking into consideration that the properties will be temperature-dependant
- build a model which can be solved efficiently because you will have to perform transient coupled-field analyses (thermo-mechanics), but on the other hand you will have to use some lots of elements for the HAZ and around the crack(s) if any
Before doing so, if you can, I'd try to determine the causes of failure by metallurgic inspection. Did you already radiographed the specimen? Was the welding controlled? And if yes, how? Do you know if the specimen already had defects? Cracks? Crack initiators somewhere in "critical" locations? Did you examine the fracture surfaces?
With data of these kinds, a good metallurgical specialist can in 90% of cases determine the mechanism and thus the cause of the failure.
Regards