Study on the Mechanical and Corrosion behavior of AA5052 Tailor Welded Blanks Fabricated using Friction Stir Welding

Friction stir welding is a unique and promising technique to produce joints with desirable mechanical strength and properties. Tailor welded blanks are processed by joining two plates of dissimilar thickness with relatively less mass. As tailor welded blanks offer higher strength at a minimal weight, the material consumption decreases making it more economically viable. In this study, the influence of the critical friction stir welding process parameters namely tool traverse speed, tool rotation speed and thickness mismatch ratio on the microhardness, corrosion rate, tensile strength (before and after corrosion) of AA5052 tailor welded blanks are investigated. The friction stir welding trials were conducted based on Box Behnken design at three levels of process parameters. Hybrid-Radial Basis Function based models were developed to explore the effect of process parameters on the properties. The optimum process parameters to obtain high tensile strength in AA5052 tailor welded blanks was found to be tool traverse speed of 60mm/min, the tool rotation speed of 850rpm and thickness mismatch ratio of 0.9.