Abstract
Lightweighting has been regarded as a key strategy in the automotive industry to improve fuel efficiency and reduce anthropogenic environment-damaging, climate-changing, and costly emissions. Magnesium (Mg) alloys and Aluminum (Al) alloys are progressively more used in the transportation industries to reduce the weight of vehicles due to their high strength-to-weight ratio. Similarly, high strength low alloy (HSLA) steel is widely used to reduce gauge thickness and still maintain the same strength, and thereby reduce vehicle weight as well. A multi-material design of automotive structures and parts inevitably involve similar Mg-to-Mg and dissimilar Mg-to-Al, Al-to-steel, and Mg-to-Cu joints. Ultrasonic spot welding (USW) – a solid-state joining technique has recently received significant attention due to its higher efficiency in comparison with conventional fusion welding techniques. In this study, USW was used to generate similar joints of low rare-earth containing ZEK100 Mg alloy sheets and dissimilar ZEK100-to-Al5754, Al6111-to-HSLA steel, and Mg-to-Cu joints at different levels of welding energy or welding time. To optimize welding process and identify key factors affecting the weld strength, microstructural evolution, microhardness test, tensile lap shear test, fatigue test, and fracture analysis were performed on similar and dissimilar ultrasonic spot welded (USWed) joints. Dynamic recrystallization and grain coarsening were observed during Mg-to-Mg similar welding while rapid formation and growth of interface diffusion layer were observed in all dissimilar joints in the present study. It was due to significantly high strain rate (~103 s-1) and high temperature generated via frictional heating during USW. The interface diffusion layer was analyzed by SEM, EDS and XRD phase identification techniques which showed the presence of eutectic structure containing intermetallic compounds (IMCs). As a result, brittleness at the interface increased. The Zn coating in dissimilar USWed Al-to-steel joints eliminated the formation of brittle IMCs of Al-F, which were replaced by relatively ductile AlZn eutectic. The optimum welding energy or welding time during similar and dissimilar USW of lightweight alloys with a sheet thickness of 1-2 mm was in the range of ~500 J to 2000 J (~0.25 s to 1 s).
Highlights
Lightweighting has been regarded as a key strategy in the automotive industry to improve fuel efficiency and reduce anthropogenic environment-damaging, climate-changing, and costly emissions
It can be reasoned that as the heat input increased with increasing welding energy, the increase in temperature resulted in grain growth, causing a decrease in hardness based on the Hall-Petch type relationship which was observed in an AZ31B-H24 Mg alloy after friction stir welding or processing [121,122]
Much of the focus of this work was on evaluating the feasibility of joining a new highperformance rare earth containing ZEK100 Mg alloy in similar (ZEK100-to-ZEK100) and dissimilar configurations with automotive grade Al5754 alloy sheet (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5)
Summary
The mounting environmental concern to diminish anthropogenic climate-changing, environment-damaging, costly and human death-causing* emissions along with unstable energy prices has driven the transportation industry to improve fuel efficiency [1–7]. Laser welding is contactless, high precision, and high speed joining technique, disadvantages such as the need for shielding gas, high initial cost and higher energy consumption limit their applications [32] Since both are a fusion joining processes, high rate of intermetallic reaction occurs in the liquid phase, which degrades the joints quality [36,39]. USW is an emerging joining process with low energy consumption, shorter weld time, no shrinkage and distortion problems [9,38,44], and higher efficiency, since heat generation is at the weld interface [9,38,44] rather than on the top surface as in FSSW [27,42,43] It was reported during welding of aluminum alloys; the USW process uses only about 0.3 kWh energy for 1000 joints [45,46] compared to 2 kWh with FSSW and 20 kWh with RSW [46]. Joining takes place by the formation and growth of microwelds at the surfaces due to nascent metal-to-metal contact, creating metallurgical adhesion and interdiffusion across the interface [27,38,44,49]
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