ANALYTICAL AND NUMERICAL THERMAL ANALYSIS ON FRICTION STIR WELDING USING POLYGONAL TOOL PIN

Frictional heat generation in the tool/matrix interface followed by the stirring of material along the weld line causes plasticized solid state joining in friction stir welding. In this paper, the existing torque based thermo-mechanical model for the tools with cylindrical pins is remodified for the polygonal tool pin profile by introducing novel multiplication factors with respect to the number of sides in the tool pin geometry. The variation in the effective heat supply with respect to the chosen pin geometry was analyzed. A comparative analysis of the proposed analytical model with the existing model was also carried out to understand the accuracy of the proposed model. Furthermore, a transient thermal numerical modelling was carried out in the view of understanding the change in process peak temperature in the stir zone and change in temperature gradient along the heat affected zone with respect to the change in pin geometry for the opted set of process input parameters. An analytically estimated heat-input-based numerical model was adopted in the present study. It was observed that the process peak temperature was directly proportional to the number of sides in the tool pin.