Three dimensional FE thermal analysis for friction stir welding of low carbon steel

Abstract

Abstract In this work, a three-dimensional heat transfer model based on Abaqus/CAE 2017 finite element (FE) software package was developed to examine the effect of heat flux from tool shoulder and pin on the temperature distribution during FSW of low carbon steel sheet. Heat flux distribution models for shoulder and pin were developed by assuming the shoulder portion as a surface heat source and the tool pin as a volumetric heat source. These non-uniform heat flux models were embedded in a Fortran code and fed to Abaqus/CAE via DFLUX subroutine. In the FE model, temperature-dependent thermal properties of low carbon steel were incorporated. The influence of traverse speeds (i.e., 300 mm/min, 450 mm/min and 600 mm/min with the constant rotational speed of 450 rpm) on transient thermal history at varying distance from the weld center line was studied. It was observed that the higher heat input increases the peak temperature with a decrease in traverse speed. The transient thermal profile obtained from the FE analysis and experiment were matched fairly well with a percentage error of 6.4% for maximum temperature.