On the Design and Analysis of Acoustic Horns for Ultrasonic Welding

Abstract

The acoustic horn plays a very vital part in high energy ultrasonic machining, and its design is critical to the quality and the efficiency of machining. This paper performs the analysis and design of acoustic horns for ultrasonic machining by employing ANSYS finite element software. Firstly, the theoretical dimensions of the horns are calculated and compared to three commercial available horns with different shapes. Moreover, their natural frequencies and amplitudes are obtained through the simulations of ANSYS. Finally, the numerical results are compared with commercial available horns.

Numerical Evaluation of State of the Art Horn Designs for Rotary Ultrasonic Vibration Assisted Machining of Nomex Honeycomb Composite

“…However, the energy losses and stress concentrations are greatest at the location of abrupt change in cross sectional area. Although, the stress concentrations can be reduced to some extent by incorporating fillet at step location [53], however increasing the fillet radius reduces the amplitude of vibration at tool end. Since stresses produced in ultrasonic horn are dynamic in nature, therefore they do not depend only on the cross sectional properties.…”

“…Jagadish et al analyzed the influence of rectangular cross section on the performance of exponential horn and compared with that of circular cross section [41]. Researchers has integrated the exponential profile with cylindrical, step and conical profiles and investigated the performance of ultrasonic system [41,43,[53][54][55]59].…”

“…1) [4,5] consists of ultrasonic generator, piezoelectric transducer, mechanical horn and cutting tool. The ultrasonic generator converts low frequency (50)(51)(52)(53)(54)(55)(56)(57)(58)(59)(60) signal to high frequency (more than 20…”

“…The lengths and diameters of the cylindrical portions, cross sectional shape (circular to rectangular) [41] and the location of mountings has also been varied to optimize and improve the performance of ultrasonic horn [42][43][44]. Hybrid horns, which are combination of basic horn profiles such as multi-step [45,46], cylindrical-conical / step-conical [31,36,39,43,44,[47][48][49][50][51][52], double conical [6,53], step-exponential / cylindrical-exponential [43,44,[53][54][55], multistep conical [56,57], step-catenoidal [54], step-Gaussian / cylindrical -Gaussian [58] and cylindrical-conical-exponential [59] have also been designed and analyze to assess horn performance. Other horn designs have also been attempted in order to improve the amplitude of vibration while keeping the stresses in acceptable limits [33,[60][61][62][63][64].…”

Full and Half-Wavelength Ultrasonic Percussive Drills

“…The objective of this research is to determine whether a smaller half-wavelength ultrasonic stack can deliver comparable performance, combined with the additional benefits of a reduction in the scale and mass of the device. The half-wavelength ultrasonic percussive stack uses a single-piece ultrasonic element with a gain of 4.6 [4].…”