Abstract
Tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding of thin stainless steel tubes is an important manufacturing process with many applications, in particular for the closure of sheathed thermocouples tubes and thermocouple wells. During the welding process, the microstructure, properties as well as the surface roughness is directly influenced by the setup of the welding procedure and material properties. For the steel tubes of thermocouples, the surface roughness also influences the appearance as well as the wetting behaviour between the probe surface and liquid, which could affect the response of the probe or the maintenance when the probe is used to measure the temperature of liquid and gaseous mediums. In this work, welding tests with controlled parameters and analysis has been conducted on thin austenite stainless tubes of different sizes, the surface roughness of the welded tube is characterised for different welding settings. The data shows that the surface roughness varies between 1-3.5 microns and oxidation patch significantly reduce the smoothness of the surface. The influence of the surface roughness of the tube is investigated and their influence on the service conditions such as wetting/dripping is discussed with reference to typical results from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation.
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