EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION ON IMPROVING WELD STRENGTH OF DISSIMILAR MATERIALS AND OPTIMIZING THE PROCESS PARAMETERS

Abstract: Friction stir welding, a solid state joining technique, is widely being used for joining Aluminium alloys for aerospace, marine automotive and many other applications of commercial importance. The recent trend is to join dissimilar materials to take advantage of low cost material in places where high strength high cost material is not needed. In this work, joining of dissimilar aluminium alloys (AA5052 & AA7075) in friction stir welding process (FSW) technique. The process parameters were optimized using Taguchi L9 orthogonal design of experiments. The parameters considered were tool rotational speed, tool translational speed and plunge depth. The optimum process parameters were decided with reference to tensile strength of the joint. The expected optimal value of tensile strength is confirmed with the confirmation run using optimum parameters. This study shows that disorder free, excessive performing welded joints may be produced with the optimum process parameters. Based at the experimental data, empirical relations representing the parameters correspond to every output characteristic have been developed using simple regression method.