Investigate the effect of TIG welding process parameters on weld distortion of AA6061

Abstract

Aluminum is one of the most adaptable common foundry metals, and the ratio of cast to wrought aluminium alloy products is increasing, owing to the increased use of welding in automotive applications. All metallic materials considered for airframe design have heterogeneous, hierarchical microstructures with interacting characteristics on many length scales, allowing for the best possible combination of qualities like as strength, toughness, and corrosion resistance. Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) welding is extremely significant, especially when welding aluminium and other metals. A TIG welding procedure would result in a large improvement in weld penetration in aluminium and improve the weldability. The AA6061 is largely used in automotive, aircraft, marine and pipelines. Due to uneven parameters selection is cause into the decrease the tensile strength and makes the distortion in the material and also affects the mechanical properties. For the better welding the input parameter selection play a most important role in the welding. For the TIG welding the most influential input parameters are selected from the ASME section IX. In this experimental work, the effect of different welding parameters like welding current, gas floe rate and included angle is selected for the project work and others is constant for the same. The filler wire which is used for the project work is ER4043 for similar welding of AA6061, 6mm thick plate joints. The most affecting input parameter on the output result is determined using a general Full Factorial and response surface methodology. Experiments is used for the optimization with MINITAB 21 version is used. Response surface optimizer is used to improve chosen parameters. After the optimization, validate the result obtained.