ICWE Predictive Tools for FSW – from Process to Performance

 

Welding, a long history metal working technique has been developed rapidly since 19th century. Currently arc welding, gas welding and resistance welding are popular applied in industry. The basic principle for these welding processes is melting the workpiece or solder to joint parts together, but during these processes high residual stress due to melting will highly decrease the mechanical property of workpiece. Along with higher quality requirement in aerospace, automobile and some other industries, more welding method were exploited. Friction stir welding (FSW) is one of these newly developed methods. Like the name state, friction between the tool and workpiece generate heat and lead to soft region near tool, workpieces will be intermixed with traveling tool under mechanical pressure. Since no melting occur during welding process, FSW shows several superiorities compare with traditional fusion welding as high residual stress and defects such as porosity, solute redistribution can be avoided during the welding process.

Currently, the whole friction stir welding process is more like an art instead of science as the underlying mechanisms is still not very clear. To get rid of the limited understanding and figure out the effect of operation parameters in the process, studies focus on the internal mechanisms of FSW process has been done by many researchers. For these researches on FSW, most of them are highly depend on experiments which take long schedule time but with low success rates. Compared to experimental method, numerical simulation is normally less expensive, more efficient and has fewer limitations which make it a promising approach to understand the mechanism of whole FSW process such as the heat generation, material flow, bonding formation, etc.

 

Industry Sponsor: TARDEC

Faculty: Zhili Feng (UTK)

Graduate Student: Xue Wang

Industry Contact: Martin McDonnell