Study on Heat Generation and Distribution in Friction Stir Welding of AA1100 Aluminum Alloy

In this article, the effects of rotational and traverse speeds in friction stir welding (FSW) tool were studied in order to order to investigate the heat generation and temperature distribution in welding zone of AA1100 aluminium alloy. Computational fluid dynamics method was utilized to simulate the process using commercial CFD Fluent 6.4 package. In order to increase the accuracy of simulation in this study, the welding line which is located between the two workpieces defined with pseudo melt behaviour around the pin tool. Simulation results showed that increasing the rotational speed of FSW tool, leads to an increase in the generated heat and larger stir zone dimension. The obtained result also revealed that the maximum temperature was produced at the advancing side and with increasing tool linear speeds the heat generation experienced growth down trend. With increasing traveling speeds the time to reach maximum temperature in stir zone intensified but the tool rotational speed had no effect on the time to reach to the maximum temperature. More than 85% of the total heat was produced by tool shoulder, and the maximum heat with selected parameters in this study was obtained to be 801oK.