ICME helps develop: Friction stir welding process for steels

Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) is a new discipline that has significant potential to reduce the cost and time required to design and deploy new materials, manufacturing technologies, and products. Researchers demonstrate how ICME is used to develop a friction stir welding (FSW) modeling tool, which can be used in a FSW process to develop products. The FSW process is extremely successful with aluminum alloys but has not progressed as smoothly with steels due to their complicated physical properties, such as thermal, mechanical, and microstructural effects. An ICME framework for developing a product using manufacturing processes includes product requirements, manufacturing process modeling tools, and the final product. A model tool has been developed using FSW as an example under the ICME framework, which includes a thermal model, microstructure model, and mechanical model.