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Evolutions of material flow and intermetallic compounds, and the correlations with mechanical properties of dissimilar Al/Cu friction stir welding joints

  • Metals & corrosion
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Abstract

In the present paper, the evolutions of material flow and intermetallic compounds (IMCs) during friction stir welding (FSW) of dissimilar Al/Cu with two different plate positions are analyzed to elucidate the correlations with mechanical properties of the joints. Under the tool rotation speed of 700 rpm and the welding speed of 110 mm/min, the Al or Cu plate is located at the advancing side (AS) and the retreating side (RS), which are marked as Al-AS/Cu-RS and Al-RS/Cu-AS, respectively. The results demonstrate that material flow plays a significant role on both the formation and the distribution features of IMCs during FSW with different plate positions. For Al-AS/Cu-RS, the dissimilar material was deposited immediately behind the tool without being drawn into the pin rotating, so that a regular two-layer IMCs within a thickness of 1.5 μm are formed throughout the Al/Cu bonding interface. For Al-RS/Cu-AS, the dissimilar material is sticking with the tool and rotating for multiple circles before it is finally deposited, both two-layer and three-layer IMCs are observed with the thickness ranging from 0.5 to 4.0 μm at the Al/Cu bonding interface, and a multitude of IMCs are also formed in the intermixing zone, which are both confirmed to be detrimental to the joint mechanical performance. Therefore, the ultimate tensile strength of the Al/Cu joint improves by over 20% with changing the position of Cu plate from the AS to the RS in FSW.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52005297).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MOE Key Lab for Liquid-Solid Structure Evolution and Materials Processing, Institute of Materials Joining, Shandong University, Jinan, 250061, China

    Hao Su, Qingzhen Zhao, Ji Chen & Chuansong Wu

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  1. Hao Su
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  2. Qingzhen Zhao
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  3. Ji Chen
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  4. Chuansong Wu
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Contributions

HS contributed to conceptualization, methodology, software, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing, project administration, funding acquisition. QZ contributed to data curation; methodology, validation. JC contributed to supervision. CW contributed to writing—review and editing, supervision.

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Correspondence to Hao Su.

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Su, H., Zhao, Q., Chen, J. et al. Evolutions of material flow and intermetallic compounds, and the correlations with mechanical properties of dissimilar Al/Cu friction stir welding joints. J Mater Sci 57, 20485–20502 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-022-07879-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-022-07879-1

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