Abstract: In order to take into account the change of stress and deformation during the whole process of welding and the thermal field distribution of a U-rib stiffened plate, a thermal elastic-plastic FEM model was adopted and element birth and death was used to simulate the weld seam fill-in and heat input. And the residual stress distribution was investigated by numerical simulations and experiments. The comparison of numerical analyses and experimental results of distribution and magnitude of residual stress showed that residual stress near the weld seam is close to material yielding stress, the average value of the residual stress far from weld seam on the mother board was around 0.2 time of material yielding stress. The residual stress distribution tendency derived from numerical simulation was close to the experiment result, which proved the validity of the numerical simulation.