Science and Technology of Welding and Joining

Laser welding, as a highly efficient processing technology, has been widely applied to manufacturing industry. This paper makes an overview on real time monitoring of laser welding. It begins with a detailed introduction to six typical sensors (photodiode, visual, spectrometer, acoustical sensor, pyrometer, plasma charge sensor) in laser welding detection. Then it makes a review on multi-sensor fusion technology in both laser welding monitoring and adaptive control. Last, subjects for future research concerning welding monitoring and control have been proposed. The paper concludes that the real-time monitoring of laser welding can provide a great amount of valid information about welding status to help effectively identify weld defects and realize adaptive control.

Characteristics of energy transfer of two laser systems, fibre and disc lasers, are studied in this paper. Laser induced plasma is characterised by estimating the electron temperature and the electron density in both laser systems. Based on the electron temperature and electron density, the coefficients of inverse Bremsstrahlung absorption are estimated to investigate the energy absorption by the plasma in both systems. The electron temperature is evaluated from the observed Fe I emission lines using Boltzmann plot, whereas the electron number density is determined from the broadened line of Fe I 381·58 nm. The penetration characteristics in both systems are examined to study the role of the attenuated beam by the plasma absorption. Based on the observed features, the performance of the disc and fibre lasers, in terms of energy transfer, are comparable. However, in high power densities, the disc laser has slightly deeper penetration.

Laser GMA hybrid welds, producing partial penetration, were conducted on stiff tubes made of S460NH. Experiments, using a design-of-experiments plan were conducted to examine the influence of the welding parameters on the occurrence of solidification cracks. Results say that cracks diminish, when high levels of arc power are applied, while their number increases with rising laser beam power. The weld velocity had no measurable impact.

This study was aimed at evaluating the static shear strength and fatigue properties of the newly developed refilled friction stir spot welded AA 6061-T6 joints. The keyhole, the process disadvantage of conventional friction stir spot welding, was refilled successfully, using an additional filler plate, with specially designed tools. Two different tool profiles, namely, convex and concave, were used for the refilling process. Sound and defect free joints were obtained by the refilling process. Joints refilled with convex tools showed better static shear strength than those with the concave ones. The variation of microhardness in different regions of the weld was analysed. Fatigue tests were conducted on the lap shear specimens at a stress ratio of R = 0·1. The optical micrographs of the welds after fatigue failure in both the conventional and refilled processes were examined to study the fatigue crack propagation and failure modes.

This paper presents an online, accurate and easy to use method for metal transfer mode classification using the input electrical impedance of arc welding as the signature. The records of the input electrical impedance are obtained by processing the welding voltage and current signals picked up at the output terminal of a welding machine. Similar to a typical linear electrical circuit consisting of a resistor, an inductor and a capacitor connected in series, the real and imaginary part of the input electrical impedance represents the combination of these electrical elements in the arc welding. Their variations directly reflect the switching among the metal transfer modes. A few experiments were conducted to confirm the above working principle and correlations between the input electrical impedance of arc welding and metal transfer. The results were then used to develop a method for online classification of metal transfer modes.

The effects of faying surface condition, pre-existing pores in base material and cover plate on the pore formation during resistance spot welding of magnesium alloy were investigated. The results reveal that the hydrogen rejection and the pre-existing pores in base material have little effect on the pore formation, and that the larger pore formation is mainly caused by shrinkage strain during resistance spot welding of magnesium alloy.

The effects of friction stir processing (FSP) parameters such as rotational, traverse speeds and tool penetration depth on the formation of fine and defect free magnesium layers were investigated. The achieved microstructures were optically studied, and the microhardness profile of the optimised workpiece was measured. The results show that rotational and traverse speeds as well as their ratio play key roles in achieving a sound friction stir processed workpiece of pure Mg. In addition, at constant rotational and traverse speeds, when the penetration depth increases, the title angle must also increases in order to have a defect free workpiece. At optimum conditions, one pass FSP significantly refined the grain size from 3 mm in the as received magnesium to 14·6 μm in friction stir process layer. The microhardness of the fabricated layer reached to about 1·6 times that of the base metal.

To improve the efficiency of acquiring monitored features and present a reliable quality assessment method for resistance spot welding, a novel method for converting the electrode displacement signal into binary image is proposed. The probabilistic neural network is adopted to provide a probabilistic viewpoint and a deterministic classification result of weld quality when the image characteristic of displacement signal is selected as monitored features. Test results of the classifier demonstrate that it is feasible and reliable to utilise binary image of the displacement signal to evaluate weld quality. The method reserves weld quality information as much as possible and it avoids complex algorithm for extracting and selecting monitored features. At the same time, when there are small samples, the classifier can identify good or bad weld rapidly and accurately even though the weld is from abnormal welding process, such as expulsion, current shunting and small edge distance condition.

The effect of preheating on strain rate and liquid flowrate is analysed to develop a model for solidification cracking in successive laser weld spots in 2024 aluminium alloy. It is shown that the lower tendency for solidification cracking with preheating can be attributed to the lower strain rate but not the feeding rate. It is also shown there is a strong tendency for solidification crack propagation through the fusion lines between the consecutive weld spots where there is already a crack present at the fusion line. This observation can be attributed to the higher local strain rate and lower feeding rate.

In multipass welding, each successive thermal cycle will introduce local melting, solid state phase transformations, grain growth, grain refinement, recrystallisation and recovery, all of which lead to a complicated stress state. Most stress measurements performed on multipass welded components represent the final residual stress state. Information concerning stress evolution on a pass-by-pass basis is difficult to find. In this investigation, six pass welds were made on high strength quenched and tempered steel sections, and depth resolved strain measurements in two orthogonal directions were carried out after each weld pass using energy dispersive synchrotron X-ray diffraction. The residual stresses were calculated using biaxial Hooke's law. A thermal–metallurgical–mechanical welding model was constructed and validated with temperature and pass-by-pass stress measurements, which improves the reliability of the model. Cross-sectional stress distributions are presented after each pass, revealing the weld stress development in multipass welds.

The weldability and mechanical properties of an ultrahigh strength wear resistant steel were substantially improved by the addition of a small amount of Ca–Mg–RE–Zr composite (1·5 kg t⁻¹) to the molten steel during the refining stage. Based on optical and electron microscopy examinations, the observed improvements were attributed to the enhanced pining effect of inclusions on the original austenite grain boundaries within the coarse grained heat affected zone, as well as the inclusion induced acicular ferrite formation within the fine grained heat affected zone.