Fracture‐Mechanics–Informed Inverse Writing of Residual Stresses in a Steel Weld

Residual stresses in welded structures are commonly treated as outcomes to be predicted or mitigated after process selection. This work formulates their generation as a residual‐stress writability problem in a reduced descriptor space combining Residual Notch Stress Intensity Factor (RNSIF), a discretization‐consistent compression‐persistence descriptor, FZERO, and finite‐distance crack‐path descriptors. Stress‐carrier analysis identifies a favorable functional class tested in a phase‐transforming steel weld with parameterized toe/root treatment. Gaussian‐process surrogates trained on 36 complete nonlinear simulations were searched over 219 Sobol points. Three previously unseen candidate configurations drawn from the frozen inverse‐search output were then evaluated independently by finite‐element simulation without surrogate refitting. Across the three blind cases, the FE RNSIF values were −225.11, −216.46, and −199.63 MPa mm 0.326 , compared with GPR predictions of −217.31, −208.56, and −199.06 MPa mm 0.326 , whereas FE FZERO remained between 0.967 and 1.163 mm versus 0.999 and 1.003 mm predicted. The finite‐distance descriptors retained the prescribed signs and were closely reproduced in magnitude. The results demonstrate numerical writability of a prescribed functional class, rather than pointwise field reproduction or arbitrary full‐field controllability.