Study of welding of butt and fillet welds using the FSW method

Abstract

In recent years, the unconventional FSW method has been increasingly used in industrial production, primarily for welding aluminium alloys or sheets of large length and thickness. Due to its specifics in relation to conventional methods, which primarily refer to rotating tools that have high productivity, i.e. service life, these methods allow us to obtain welded joints up to 1000 m in length with one tool. This procedure can also be used to obtain construction profiles such as "L" profile. In this paper, welding of a sheet of aluminium alloy 6082T6 with a thickness of 7.8 mm is conducted with a butt and fillet welds, so that it is possible to perform a comparative analysis of welded joints. During the process, the components of the forces on the butt joint were measured in three normal directions (Fz, Fx, and Fy). FSW is an environmentally clean technology when compared to conventional processes because during the process the material does not melt, there are no harmful fumes, harmful radiation, light flash, no atmosphere of shielding gases or additional material, which characterizes all conventional processes. For the needs of this research, special auxiliary accessories were constructed and manufactured, as well as special shapes of conical tools.