Degradation Processes of Al-Zn Welded Joints

Abstract

Welding of metal materials belongs to non-demountable joints. Current trend especially in an automotive industry is to join materials with a different melting temperature. Most of all, there are dural profiles with ferrite or austenite steel. The reason for this is the effort to lower the weight of the whole construction and at the same time preserve sufficient mechanical characteristics. However, there is a big risk of different electrical potentials of both of these metals in this type of non-demountable joints. The experimental part of this paper brings evaluation of mechanical-corrosion processes of overlapped joints produced by the CMT (cold metal transfer) method. The base material for weld bead is dural sheet AlMg3 and dural sheet with a surface treatment aluzinc DX51D+AZ 150. Material AlSi5 in the form of a wire was used as an additional material for a welding bath. Method CMT was used in order to create a weld bead. Initial analysis of weld bead was done visually using a binocular microscope. Further, a metallographic analysis of weld bead and base material was processed. The aim was to identify the heat affected area around the welded joint. Microhardness of intermetallic aluminium phases was measured, after the identification of intermetallic phases a chemical analysis EDS was processed. Prepared samples underwent corrosion degradation in a salt spray environment in compliance with the norm ČSN EN ISO 9227. Visual and metallographic evaluation of the individual samples was processed after every week of exposition to the salt spray environment. The goal of this experiment was to record the initial impulse of galvanic corrosion which consists in corrosion degradation in the area of welded joint.