Experimental and numerical studies on friction welding of AA6061T6Ti6Al4V joints

Abstract

Medical, aerospace and automotive industries rely mostly on lightweight materials like titanium and aluminium. In this current research work, keeping this into account we have used AA6061-T6/Ti-6Al-4V as the raw materials for friction welding. One such example can be seen in the Fluid coupler used in aircrafts wherein friction welding is used for joining this dissimilar material AA6061-T6/Ti-6Al-4V combination. The strength of the dissimilar joint and joint interfacial properties is very important in all these applications. Failure in joint interface, plays a major role that would result in huge losses. Generally, joining of dissimilar materials has many issues because of the formation of intermetallic compounds at the weld interface region and more amount of material consumption during the joining process. In this research work, experimental investigation on the quality of dissimilar AA6061-T6/Ti-6Al-4V joints was carried out by varying process parameters. By employing a non-contact IR thermometer along with a series of thermocouples, the thermal history of the dissimilar metals during the process of joining are studied. Possible remedial measures for accomplishing successful joint with minimum material loss and failure rate in the dissimilar joints are investigated by introducing novel interlayer technique. Effect of joint design to obtain the low material loss and better bonding strength are explored. Corrosion, which is a potential threat to AA6061-T6/Ti-6Al-4V joints is studied by means of high impedance thermo-gravimetric technique. A dedicated numerical investigation is carried out using ABAQUS software to predict the metal loss, temperature distribution and stress of the dissimilar joint under different processing conditions. Numerical model is validated using the measured values during experimentation. newline newline newline