State-of-the-art of extrusion welding and proposal of a method to evaluate quantitatively welding quality during three-dimensional extrusion process

Aluminum alloy profiles have been widely used in many fields and are attracting more and more attention now. However, for the hollow profiles, longitudinal welding lines occur inevitably and appear on the extruded profiles. Currently, most research in the literatures focuses on the two-dimensional extrusion welding process, which could not reflect the real formation process of a welding line and there are not effective method to evaluate the welding quality during extrusion process. The first part of this work reviews the-state-of-the-art of the extrusion welding in the current literatures. In the second part, a novel method is proposed to evaluate the welding quality during a three-dimensional extrusion process. This method extends the application of the current welding criterion from a two-dimensional extrusion process to a three-dimensional one. By simulating the transient extrusion process of an aluminum tube with Forge-3D, the proposed method is used to evaluate the welding quality of the extrusion process. Based on the method, the effects of extrusion speed and welding chamber on welding quality are investigated quantitatively. With the increasing extrusion speed or decreasing height of welding chamber, the welding quality is getting worse, which is identical to the experimental observations in other publications. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.