5th International & 26th All India Manufacturing Technology, Design and Research Conference (AIMTDR 2014) December

12th–14th, 2014, IIT

Guwahati, Assam, India

Development and Analysis of Butt and Lap welds in Micro Friction Stir
Welding (µFSW)

Shuja Ahmed1, Abhishek Shubhrant2, Akash Deep3, Probir Saha4*

1
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna
800013, E-Mail: shuja.pme13@iitp.ac.in
2
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna
800013, E-Mail: abhishek.me10@iitp.ac.in
3
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna
800013, E-Mail: akash.me10@iitp.ac.in
4*
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna
800013, E-Mail: psaha@iitp.ac.in

Abstract
Manufacturing of the ever smaller components, be it mechanical, electronic, etc. is being chased upon. Also in
friction stir welding (FSW), when the thickness of the joining plates is reduced to less than 1 mm i.e., micro friction
stir welding (µFSW), the application areas relate to joining thin walled structures in electrical, electronic and micro-
mechanical assemblies and in the packaging industry. Advantages of FSW like its being a solid state process, it not
requiring shielding gases and fluxes and its possibility to weld dissimilar and different thickness alloys emphasize
the use of it to weld micro thickness plates. In the present work, commercial grade AA6XXX series aluminium
alloys of thickness 0.44 mm have been welded together in both butt and lap fashion. Tests have been conducted to
measure the joint’s tensile strength (by conducting both transverse and longitudinal tension tests) and the micro
hardness. The use of lap welds in application areas of µFSW was established.
Keywords: micro friction stir welding (µFSW), butt and lap fashion, tensile strength, micro hardness

1 Introduction
In the year 1991, The Welding Institute (TWI)
invented a new technology of joining materials using
the frictional heat. Therein, the heat is generated using a
rotating tool that aids in joining unlike the rotating
shafts that are themselves joined in friction welding.
Termed as ‘friction stir welding’, this technology very
soon gained importance for its ability in joining all
series of aluminium alloys which are used to a large
extent in the aerospace, shipping, railroad and
automobile industries.
Fusion welding process is not suitable for
aluminium alloys due to its high thermal expansion
coefficient. The high heat transfer rate makes the laser
welding difficult and due to high electrical transfer the
use of resistant welding is also a restriction. In friction
stir welding, a non-consumable rotating tool with a
probe is plunged into the joining area. The tool after
reaching the required plunge depth undergoes dwell
(rotation at the plunge depth for few seconds) which
softens the workpiece material ahead making welding
easier. The heating is achieved due to friction between
the tool and the workpiece, and by the plastic
deformation of the workpiece. Next is the rotation plus
translation of the tool along the weld line which leads to
the stirring action. During stirring, the material moves
from the advancing side to the retreating side of the tool
and undergoes plastic deformation at high temperature
which produces fine and recrystallized grains. Fig. 1
shows the schematic representation of the process and
the parameters it is associated with.
Joint configurations for FSW include square butt,
edge butt, T-butt, lap, multiple lap, T-lap, etc. In the
application areas of the µFSW, both the butt as well as
lap joints can be used. Research works done in joining
of micro thickness plates have mainly focused on the
butt joint configurations. However, lap joints can also
be used as a replacement of fasteners and specifically at
places where modifications in the current parts are not
necessary. Plates of different thickness can also be
easily friction stir welded when in lap joint
configuration.
Tool rotation speed and tool transverse speed are
two important process parameters that govern the
quality of the weld done. Vijayan et al. (2010) using
multi-objective optimization and analysis of variance
showed that the tool rotational speed is the highly
significant factor. The alloy used was AA 5083 and in
‘butt’ joint configuration. Laxminarayanan et al. (2008),

563-1
Development and Analysis of Butt and Lap welds in Micro Friction Stir Welding (µFSW)
Peel et al. (2003) and Hirata et al. (2007) showed that
there is an optimum value of FSW process parameters
for which the weld quality is the best. At other
combination of these parameters the resulting weld is
poor. The analysis in the present work has been done
using those
se process parameters that gave good quality of
the weld.
Fig. 1 Schematic representation of the FSW process
(TMAZ= Thermo-Mechanically
Mechanically Affected Zone;
HAZ= Heat Affected Zone;
TAZ= Thermally Altered Zone
Zone)
Limited
imited work has been done in joining of micro
thickness plates by µFSW. Scialpi et al. (2007) did a
mechanical analysis of ultra-thinthin FSW and he joined
sheets with dissimilar and similar materials. µFSW was
used for producing only ‘butt’ welds on 0.8 mm thick
sheets of 2024-T3, 6082-T6 T6 materials and of dissimilar
2024-6082 alloys. The results showed that the joints had
excellent mechanical properties; and the tensile failur
failure
occurring in the welded zone was because of
irregularities in thee thickness rather than by any defect.
Nishihara et al. (2004) had studied the feasibility of
µFSW and there ere the material used was AZ31
magnesium alloy. Sattari et al. (2012) welded sheets of
AA5083 0.8 mm thick in ‘butt’ joint configuration and
studied its mechanical properties as well as the
temperature distribution during welding. It was
concluded that with higher speed the resulting weld was
having microscopic defects and welds obtained between
430°C to 510° C were defect free. Scialpi et al. (2008)
again welding 0.8 mm thick alloys of 2024 2024-T3 and
6082-T6 concluded the formation of two distinct stirred
zones, one for each alloy.
The study of lap joints in µFSW is still an open area
of research. For applications as in joining of lid on an
airr tight (hermetically) sealed package which is a
common requirement of high reliability electronics,
both ‘butt’ and ‘lap’ weld geometries can be used to join
materials having similar or dissimilar cross sections.
Buffa et al. (2009) investigated the influence of process
parameters on the metallurgical and mechanical
properties of friction stir welded lap joints of AA2198-
T4 aluminium alloy.. It was shown that to produce
effective FSW lap joint the nugget area should be kept
as wide as possible considering at the same time the
nugget integrity. Salari et al. (2014) studied the
influence of tool geometry on the structural and
mechanical properties of the lap joint of 5456
aluminium alloy and the result indicated that the stepped
conical thread pin improved the joint’sjoint integrity and
mechanical properties by improving the material flow
during FSW. The mounting of specimens for lap joint
configuration was also taken care of. Elangovan et al.
(2007) investigated the effect of pin profile on the
friction stir processed zone formation
formati in AA2219
aluminium alloy. Straight traight cylindrical, tapered
cylindrical, threaded cylindrical, triangular and square
were the five profiles that were used to fabricate
fabricat the
joints at three different rotational speeds. It was found
that the square tool pin profile produces mechanically
sound and metallurgically defect free welds as
compared to other tool pin profiles.
profiles Fujii et al. (2006)
studied the effect of tool shape on mechanical properties
and microstructures of welded aluminium plates. Based
on the results, an optimal tool shape was suggested for
high melting temperature metals such as steels. Parida et
al. (2014) surveyed that complicated
licated tool profile wears
out after a few number of runs specially while working
with higher tensile strength materials.
materials In the present
work the study was made using simple tool geometry –
a straight cylindrical pin profile with flat shoulder.
shoulder
2 Experimental Procedures
Commercial grade aluminium alloys of thickness
0.44 mm were joined using H13 as rotating tool. The
composition of the aluminium alloy and the tool is as
shown in Table 1 and Table 2 respectively. The rotating
tool was plunged into and traversed
versed perpendicular to the
base plates. To begin with, samples
amples were prepared with
certain feeds and rotations and the best samples
(according to visual inspection) were recorded at some
particular parameters. Tests were conducted on samples
prepared at these parameters only which are shown in
Table 3.
Table 1 Composition of Al alloy
Element Al Si Mg Cr Fe Cu
%Weight 97.62 0.80 0.42 0.06 0.72 0.38
563-2
5th International & 26th All India Manufacturing Technology, Design and Research Conference (AIMTDR 2014) December 12th–14th, 2014, IIT
Guwahati, Assam, India

Table 2 Composition of H13 tool
Element Cr Mo Si V C
% Weight 4.98 1.32 1.05 0.98 0.40
Table 3 Process parameters used in µFSW joints
Process parameters Tool rotation Tool transverse
speed (rpm) speed (mm/min)
Butt weld 1650 25
Lap weld 1700 25
2.1 Development of Tool
Friction stir welding at macro level require a
sufficiently hard welding tool which can soften the
material without itself being deformed. Similarly while
making an approach to weld materials at micro level,
hardness play a vital role. In the past, researchers have
used materials like H13 (52 HRC) and 56NiCrMoV7-
KU (24.2 HRC).. The tool material used here was H13.
Development of the tool geometry having dimensions in
hundred of microns
rons was achieved through micro
micro-turning
on DT-110 (high precision multi-purpose
purpose machine
machine-tool).
The micro-turning operation was performed at 100 rpm
spindle speed and a manual feed in sub
sub-millimeters. Fig.
2 shows the tool geometries that were used for welding
‘butt’ and ‘lap’ configurations and that were chosen as
per the literature survey.
Butt-weld tool Lap
Lap-weld tool
Fig. 2 Geometry of the H13 tool used for µFSW
2.2 Development of Fixture
µFSW require very high precision. The fixture
plays a very crucial role in this technique. The sheets
should be aligned very accurately without any
deflection at the top surface. It has to be held very
tightly so that by nullifying its movement during
machining we get joints without defects
defects. Also due to
high heat conduction rate of aluminium, the high rate of
loss in heat can make it very difficult to soften the
sheets. So, the fixture must be made up of heat resistant
material. The fixture consisted of two major
components- one was backing plates and the other was
top clamps. To begin with, acrylic sheets of 10 mm
thickness were used both as backing plate and as top
clamping. But it was observed that the welding samples
got deflected at 1200 rpm of welding operation and low
quality welds were obtained due to high heat
dissipation.. The potential reason was poor clamping of
Al sheets. Therefore, a new fixture design was proposed
Mn
in order to have better clamping during duri welding
0.38 operation and where the clamping force was
concentrated over the plates using two bolts creating a
couple of forces in opposite direction at different
lengths, hence providing the net downward moment to
the clamps where they touched the sheets.
sheets Fig. 3 shows
the corresponding µFSW experimental
experime setup. The
backing plate used was of heat resistant material ma
Bakelite.
Mechanism
of clamping
Tool
Backing
Plate
Al
sheets
Fig. 3 µFSW experimental set up
2.3 Welding Operation
The aluminium sheets were cut as per the required
dimensions on wire-EDM.
EDM. The welding operation was
performed using the micro-machinemachine DT-110.
DT The
rotating tool was mounted on the spindle using a
suitable collet. The sheets to be joined were clamped
onto the backing plate in such a way that any movement
of the sheets could be avoided during welding. With the
help of contact probe the tool pin was made to touch the
sheets at the weld line and the co-ordinates
ordinates were set to
zero at that point. Next, the G-code, where the rotational
speed, plunge depth, transverse speed and weld length
were set beforehand, was executed for performing the
welding operation. While performing lap welding it was
taken care that the advancing side of the probe was
located near the top sheet edge. An overlap widthwidt of
about 10 mm was used. Fig. 4 shows some of the weld
specimens prepared.
Joints for transverse Joints for longitudinal
l
tension test tension test
Fig. 4 Weld specimens prepared using µFSW
3 Results and Discussion
The results of longitudinal tension
tensi test, transverse
tension test and micro hardness test on both of ‘butt’

563-3
Development and Analysis of Butt and Lap welds in Micro Friction Stir Welding (µFSW)
and
nd ‘lap’ joint configurations are described in
subsequent sub-sections.
3.1 Tensile test
The transverse tension test,, where the applied load
is orthogonal to the weld direction investigates the
joint’s efficiency by studying its mechanical behavio
behaviour.
The longitudinal tension test, where the applied load is
along the direction of the weld, is used to study the
mechanical behaviour of the zone subjected to stirring.
The results of these tests obtained were compared to
with that of the base material. Table 4 gives some
mechanical properties of the Al-alloy
alloy we have used.
Table 4 Mechanical properties of Al alloy
Yield tensile strength (MPa)
Ultimate tensile strength (MPa)
% Elongation
Vickers hardness (HV)
To ensure the accuracy of the measurement, the
tests were conducted on three welded samples
samples. First, the
welded samples of specific weld length were produced
using this technology and then these were cut using
wire-EDM
EDM as per the specifications of the standard test
method for tension testing, ASTM-E8E8 as shown in Fig.
5.
Fig. 5 (i) Dimensions (in mm) of the transverse
tension test specimen as per ASTM standard
(ii)) Dimensions (in mm) of the longitudinal tension
test specimen as per ASTM standard
Fig. 6 Stress-strain
strain curve for transverse tension test
The tensile tests were performed on UTM machine.
Fig. 6 shows the engineering stress-strain
strain curve of the
base metal, butt weld and lap weld in transverse tension
test. And Fig. 7 shows the engineering stress-strain
stress
curve of the same in longitudinal tension test.
90
110 strain curve for longitudinal tension test
Fig. 7 Stress-strain
8
46 Through the plots it can be seen that the lap welds
are having better tensile properties than butt welds in
both transverse and longitudinal tension tests. Failure of
the lap joint in transverse tension was observed to be in
the thinner upper weld instead of at the nugget between
the sheets. Longitudinal tests for lap joints showed
convincing results. Here, higher yield point was
observed compared to transverse tests.
3.2 Micro-hardness test
Hardness tests are performed to test the material’s
ability to resist plastic deformation, usually by
penetration and at places also due to scratching or
cutting. The present micro-hardness
hardness test was performed
using a Vickers penetrator under a load of 100 gf for 10
seconds which was as found in some literatures.
literatures The
samples were polished with different grades of emery
papers. Readings were taken on cross-sections
cross
orthogonal to the welding direction at distances of 0.25
mm apart. The obtained curve for hardness profile is as
shown in Fig. 8.
Fig. 8 Cross-sectional micro-hardness
hardness of ‘butt’ and
‘lap’ µFSW
It can be observed that the stir zone (SZ) has more
or less a constant value of hardness. A slight drop was
563-4
5th International & 26th All India Manufacturing Technology, Design and Research Conference (AIMTDR 2014) December 12th–14th, 2014, IIT
Guwahati, Assam, India
found when moving from SZ to TMAZ with a minimum
somewhat at the junction between TMAZ and HAZ.
Hardness value again increased in the HAZ and became
constant for the base metal. Improvement in ductility
due to lower hardness value at the joint was observed.
No significant difference between lap and butt joint
harness trend could be observed other than a little lower
minimum value for the lap joint which could be
attributed to its having better ductility at the time of
failure.
4 Conclusions
In this work, using µFSW, 0.44 mm thick
aluminium alloys have been successfully welded in both
‘butt’ and ‘lap’ joint configurations and following
conclusions were drawn.
• In application areas where possibility of butt as
well as lap configuration of joints is available,
joining the materials in lap fashion would
produce better joint strength.
• Thickness increase near and along the joint line
when producing lap weld is a demerit in its
application areas.
• It was seen that the more the material is
available for stirring, the stronger is the joint.
• For materials having thickness in the range of
less than 0.5 mm, it is better to opt for lap
welding wherein the thickness increase for
stirring at the joint would improve the
performance measures of µFSW.
References
Vijayan, S., Raju, R. and Rao, S. R. K. (2010),
Multiobjective optimization of friction stir welding
process parameters on aluminium alloy AA 5083 using
Taguchi-based Grey relation analysis, Materials and
Manufacturing Processes, Vol. 25:11, pp. 1206-1212.
Lakshminarayanan, K. and Balasubramanian, V. (2008),
Process parameters optimization for friction stir welding
of RDE-40 aluminum alloy using Taguchi technique,
Transactions of NonFerrous Metal Society of China,
Vol.18, pp. 548-554.
Peel, M., Steuwer, A., Preuss, M. and Withers, P. J.
(2003), Microstructure, mechanical properties and
residual stresses as a function of welding speed in
aluminium AA5083 friction stir welds, Acta Materialia,
Vol.51, pp. 4791-4801.
Hirata, T., Oguri, T., Hagino, H. and et. al. (2007),
Influence of friction stir welding parameters on grain
size and formability in 5083 aluminum alloy, Journal of
Materials Science and Engineering, Vol. A 456, pp.
344–349.
Scialpi, A., De Giorgi, M., De Filippis, L. A. C. ,
Nobile, R. and Panella, F. W. (2007), Mechanical
Analysis of ultra-thin friction stir welding joined sheets
with dissimilar and similar materials, Journal of
Materials and Design, Vol. 29, pp. 928-936.
Nishihara, T. and Nagasaka, Y. (2004), Development of
micro-FSW, In Proceedings of the 5th international
friction stir welding symposium Metz, September 14-16,
2004, France.
Sattari, S., Bisadi, H. and Sajed, M. (2012), Mechanical
properties and temperature distributions of thin friction
stir welded sheets of AA5083, International Journal of
Mechanics and Applications, Vol. 2(1), pp. 1-6.
Scialpi, A., De Fillipis, L. A. C., Cuomo, P. and Di
Summa, P. (2008), Micro friction stir welding of 2024-
6082 aluminium alloys, Welding International, Vol.
22:1, pp. 16-22.
Buffa, G., Campanile, G., Fratini, L. and Prisco, A.
(2009), A Friction stir welding of lap joints: influence of
process parameters on the metallurgical and mechanical
properties, Journal of Materials Science and
Engineering, Vol. A 519, pp. 19-26.
Salari, E., Jahazi, M., Khodabandeh, A. and Ghasemi-
Nanesa, H. (2014), Influence of tool geometry and
rotational speed on mechanical properties and defect
formation in friction stir lap welded 5456 aluminium
alloy sheets, Journal of Materials and Design, Vol. 58,
pp. 381-389.
Elangovan, K. and Balasubramanian, V. (2007),
Influences of pin profile and rotational speed of the tool
on the formation of friction stir processing zone in
AA2219 aluminium alloy, Journal of Materials Science
and Engineering, Vol. A 459, pp. 7-18.
Fujii, H., Cui, L., Maeda, M. and Nogi, K. (2006),
Effect of tool shape on mechanical properties and
microstructure of friction stir welded aluminium alloys,
Journal of Materials Science and Engineering, Vol. A
419, pp. 25-31.
Parida, B., Mohapatra, M. M. and Biswas, P. (2014),
Effect of tool geometry on mechanical and micro-
structural properties of friction stir welding of Al-alloy,
International Journal of Current Engineering and
Technology, Special Issue-2, pp. 88-92.
563-5