Temperature Distribution of Aluminum Alloys under Friction Stir Welding

Abstract

The temperature distribution of 6061-T6 aluminum alloy plates under a friction stir butt-welding was investigated by using experiment and numerical simulation. A real-time temperature measuring system was used to measure the temperature change in the welding process. Vickers hardness profiles were made on the cross-section of the weld after welding. A commercial software of FlexPDE, a solver for partial different equations with finite element method, was used to simulate the experimental welding process of this study. Comparison the experimental and numerical results, the temperature cycles calculated by numerical are similar to those measured by experiment. The temperature distribution profile obtained from the numerical simulation is symmetrical to the weld center and has a close correspondence with the hardness configuration and the microstructure of the weld. The region with the temperature over 300 °C is the zone of softening within the boundaries of base material and HAZ. The regions of 350 °C with minimum hardness are located near the boundary of HAZ and TMAZ. The maxima temperature about 500 °C distributes around the upper part of the weld center. However, the region above 400 °C only matches with the upper half of the weld nugget.

Flow patterns in friction stir welds of AA5083 and AA6082 alloys

“…This is because thorough understanding of the flow will help to predict the performance of friction stir welds in service. Researchers have employed different techniques and models in attempting to establish the flow patterns, as well as material positioning in dissimilar friction stir welds with consideration of different welding parameters [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. However, all of these are far from being fully understood and established.…”

Numerical Simulation of the Thermo-Mechanical Behavior of 6061 Aluminum Alloy during Friction-Stir Welding

“…Accordingly, the welding temperature normally decreases towards the weld root [7,8,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. In contrast, the temperature distribution in the width direction of the stir zone is often found to be nearly symmetric [8,11,19,[24][25][26][27]. In many cases, however, a slightly increased temperature (~10-20 K) is predicted on the advancing side (AS) [5,8,9,[16][17][18]23,[28][29][30].…”