High Strength Nanotreated Filler Material for TIG Welding of AA6061

Abstract

Incorporating structural parts into functional assemblies using a variety of techniques, such as bolting, riveting, brazing, and welding is important for today’s industry and society. When joining AA6061 by Tungsten Inert Gas welding, designers so far had to rely on filler materials, such as ER5356 and ER4043 to dilute the joints melting zone and therefore suppress AA6061’s intrinsic susceptibility to hot cracking. However, welding with dissimilar alloys as filler materials is always a tradeoff between enabling the material for fusion welding and accepting drawbacks of the diluted melting zone’s properties. In this work, a low volume fraction of titanium carbide particles were incorporated into AA6061 to fabricate filler rods. The fabricated AA6061-TiC filler material was further used to TIG weld AA6061 base material. The welds produced by using the nanotreated filler rods were free of cracks and showed exceptional mechanical properties in both as welded and post weld heat treatment condition. The new nanotreated AA6061 filler materials offer a great potential for widespread applications.