Influence of reduced cooling time on the properties of resistance spot welds

Reducing the cooling time in a resistance spot welding schedule offers two possible advantages. The first is decreased weld cycle time, which is of great importance in particular to car body assembly lines performing hundreds of millions of spot welds each year. Decreasing each resistance spot weld cycle time by a mere 0.1 s leads to substantial cost savings. The second advantage is the possibility to reduce the hardness in the weld metal and thereby improve fracture behaviour. Reducing the cooling time leads to reduced cooling rate of the weld metal and potentially a softer material. Two and three-sheet joint combinations of martensitic, dual phase, transformation induced plasticity (TRIP), complex phase and hardened boron steels were investigated in this study. The joints were evaluated by shear-, peeland cross-tension testing as well as metallographical examinations and hardness measurements. With knowledge of the materials weldability, and evaluation of the behaviour when welding with reduced cooling time, it was possible to develop optimised weld schedules and thereby increased productivity. It is recommended that the programming of the hold time in the power sources is modified in order to enable full flexibility in setting of the hold time / cooling time. This study showed that the cooling time could be reduced significantly without endangering the joint integrity.