A Study of Tool Wear and its Effect on the Mechanical Properties of Friction Stir Welded AA6092/17.5 Sicp Composite Material Joint

In most of the cases to weld AMCs friction stir welding is preferred than conventional welding process due to its specific advantages. But though there are advantages of welding AMCs by FSW the wear of tool material at the time of welding may become the major limitation of the process. The current experimental work is mainly focused on the study of tool wear and its effect mechanical properties of the weld joint. The workpiece plate used in this work is AA6092/17.5 SiCp composite material of 6.3 mm thickness. The FSW tool is made of H13 tool steel material with taper cylindrical pin geometry. Three sets of welding were done with varying tool rotational speed of 1000 rpm, 1500 rpm and 2000 rpm, keeping traverse speed fixed at 2mm/sec and toot tilt angle at 2 degrees. The result shows that at 2000 rpm the tool wear phenomenon is very much prominent compared to other two rotational speeds. EDS analysis shows the presence of Fe particles in the nugget zone. From the microhardness graph, it has been observed that the hardness of nugget zone of the sample welded in 2000 rpm shows the higher value of hardness compares to the other joints due to the presence of Fe particle in nugget zone. It has been also observed from the tensile testing that the tensile properties of the sample welded at 2000 rpm show the minimum values. It can be recommended from the current study that the particular type of material can be weld by FSW with the current tool material and design within a tool rotational range of 10001500 rpm to obtain the better result. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.