Engineering Commons^™

Investigation Of Void Formation In Friction Stir Welding Of 7n01 Aluminum Alloy, Xingxin Zhao, Jianmin Han, Joseph P. Domblesky, Zhiyong Yang, Zhiqiang Li, Xiaolong Liu

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is a solid state joining process that is widely used to produce high integrity aluminum weldments for a variety of industries. While extensive work has been conducted to understand flow behavior, much less research has been performed to identify how void defects form and how to predict them. In the present study, the relationship between rotation speed, plasticized region, and defect formation was investigated. To analyze how tunneling and cavity type void defects form during FSW, a 3-D Computational fluid dynamics(CFD) model based on the Fluent software code was used to simulate butt welding. The CFD …