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Materials Science and Engineering A 403 (2005) 340348

The nite element simulation of the friction stir welding process


H.W. Zhang , Z. Zhang, J.T. Chen
Department of Engineering Mechanics, State Key Laboratory of Structural Analysis for Industrial Equipment, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, PR China Received in revised form 11 May 2005; accepted 19 May 2005

Abstract Solid mechanics-based nite element models and computational procedures are developed to study the ow patterns and the residual stresses in frictional stir welding (FSW). Two-dimensional results of the material ow patterns and the residual stresses are presented. The ow of metal during FSW is investigated using tracer particles. It is shown that the ows on the advancing side and retreating side are different. After several rotations the material which is rotating around the nib sloughs off in its wake of the pin, primarily on the advancing side. The residual stresses of the welded plate are investigated in this analysis. The distribution of the longitudinal residual stress along the direction perpendicular to the welding line is a double feature curve. With the increase of the translational velocity, the maximum longitudinal residual stress can be increased. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Friction stir welding; Finite element simulation; Residual stress; Material ow; Equivalent plastic strain

1. Introduction Friction stir welding (FSW) [1] is a new solid-state joining technology invented at the welding institute (TWI) in 1991. It has become a unique technique well suited for joining many hard-to-weld metals, especially the high strength aluminum alloys and some dissimilar metals. Compared with the conventional welding processes, FSW possesses many advantages over traditional fusion joining techniques, such as no melting, low defect and low distortion, and FSW can even join thin and thick sections. This new technique is being successfully applied to the aerospace, automobile, and shipbuilding industries and opens up a broad avenue of joining technology development and research. Like any new technology many unanswered questions remain, but even such a fundamental question is how the material ows from the front to back around the pin remains the subject of various investigations. For aluminum welds, temperatures near the rotating pin never reach the melting point [2], but quite complicated ow has been observed in

Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 411 84706249; fax: +86 411 84708769. E-mail address: zhanghw@dlut.edu.cn (H.W. Zhang).

welds [3,4]. Colligan [5] followed material ow in 6061 and 7075 aluminum by imbedding small steel balls as tracers into grooves cut into the work piece parallel to the weld line. Murr et al. [6] and Li et al. [7] showed that dynamic recrystallization plays a key role in material movement and that for many similar examples of extreme deformation at very high strain rates, solid-state ow accommodates the process, which include shaped charges, hypervelocity impact crater formation, and thick metal or alloy target penetration by ballistic energy rods. Another fundamental aspect of such thermal and thermomechanical processes is still not completely understood. It is well known that the residual stress of the weld affects the fatigue properties [8]. Webster et al. [9] reported the measurement of residual stress in FSW by X-ray technique, which shows that the longitudinal residual stress varies in the range from 60 to 140 MPa, and also shows a correlation between the detailed residual stress feature and the heat ow in the weld. Sutton et al. [10] investigated the residual stress in 2024-T3 aluminum friction stir butt welds using the neutron diffraction technique, and the results show that the highest stresses occur near the crown side of the weld over the entire FSW region.

0921-5093/$ see front matter 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.msea.2005.05.052

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Numerical simulations have been done to investigate the mechanism of material ow in FSW process. Since 1999 there have been several interesting studies focused on observing material ow patterns in the FSW process. Smith et al. [11] reported an effort to determine material properties for uid dynamics simulations. Seidel and Reynolds [12] described a two-dimensional simulation study based on uid dynamics, which predicted material ow patterns that compare well with experimental results. Because their difculties, solid mechanics-based models and simulations that include material ow effects appeared in the literature later than thermal or thermal mechanical models and uid dynamics models, which usually does not include consideration of elastic responses of the work piece. A two-dimensional modeling and simulation effort, based on the Arbitrary LagrangianEulerian (ALE) nite element formulation and with material ow effects, was reported by Deng and Xu [1314], which serves as the basis of the current paper. The above effort has been extended to three-dimensional material ow by Xu and Deng [15]. In this paper, a two-dimensional model based on the Arbitrary LagrangianEulerian nite element method is proposed to study the evolution of the stresses in the FSW process and the residual stresses of the welded plates. The entire welding process is simulated using the commercial nite element package ABAQUS. Different with the work mentioned above, the whole process including the ow patterns of the material, the strain and stress distributions, the residual stresses can be modeled in this research work. This model is based on solid mechanics, in which the elastic responses of the work pieces are considered.

Fig. 1. The geometry model and the boundary conditions of FSW.

temperature on yielding is considered explicitly in this analysis. The properties of the material at different temperatures are shown in Table 1 [16]. T represents temperature, E elastic modulus, u the current yield stress and the Poissons ratio. The material ow and the strain and stress distributions are modeled in this paper to help understand the mechanism of FSW. The residual stress of the plate will be investigated after the FSW process is nished. 2.1. Material and the associated ow

2. Model description In FSW the work piece material in front of the tool will be pushed aside by the pin and forced to ow around the pin by the action of the pin, so large plastic ow develops around the pin. In order to model the contacting surface properly and handle mesh distortion during large plastic deformation, a thermo-mechanical nite element based on the Arbitrary LagrangianEulerian formulation and adaptive remeshing are employed in this study. The radius of the pin is R = 3 mm, and the dimensions of the two plates are 100 mm in length (along the welding line), 30 mm in width. The geometric schematic is shown in Fig. 1. Three cases are modeled to investigate the effect of the variations of process parameters on the ow behaviors, equivalent plastic strain, residual stress, etc. The two-dimensional geometry described above is divided into four-node quadrilateral elements. Reduced integration with hourglass control is used to avoid the mesh-locking problems associated with large incompressible plastic deformation. The mesh consists of 11,717 elements and 11,986 nodes. The material of the plate is AL6061-T6, as a rate independent elasticplastic material. However, the effect of

Isotropic material behavior with isotropic hardening is considered. The constitutive relations are given by von Mises yield criterion and the associated ow rule. The ow rule can be written as: dpl = d i gi (1)

where gi ( , , Hi, ) is the is the temperature-dependent ow potential and di is a scalar measuring the amount of the plastic ow rate, whose value is determined by the requirement
Table 1 Temperature-dependent material properties for AL6061-T6 T( C) 25.00 100.00 148.89 204.44 260.00 315.56 371.11 426.67 482.22 E (GPa) 66.94 63.21 61.32 56.80 51.15 47.17 43.51 28.77 20.20 u (MPa) 278.12 260.68 251.24 221.01 152.26 73.87 36.84 21.58 10.49 0.330 0.334 0.335 0.336 0.338 0.360 0.400 0.410 0.420

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to satisfy the consistency condition: fi = 0 (2)

For some rate independent plasticity models the direction of the ow is the same as the direction of the outward normal to the yield surface: gi fi = ci (3)

where ci is a scalar. Such models are called associated ow plastic models. To accelerate the computation, the tool rotation and the translation speeds are both increased 1000 times in this analysis, so that the ratio /R stays the same. This acceleration is necessary because the slow speed in practical FSW process cannot be completed in a realistic period of time using ABAQUS code. To minimize the effect of this change, rate independent elasticplastic material is used in this study and the effect of temperature on yielding is considered, as shown in Table 1. The yielding stress can be written as: q = 0 ( pl , ) 2.2. Integration method The simplest operator that provides unconditional stability for integration equations is the backward Euler method. The strain rate decomposition is integrated over a time increment as: = where el + pl (5) (4)

Fig. 2. Modied Coulomb Law.

The NewtonRaphson iteration method is applied until the ow equation and yield constraints are satised. 2.3. The denition of contact In this paper the friction control model is used. The interface may experience frictional contact described by a modied Coulomb friction law, as shown in Fig. 2. The coordinate system x1 o1 y1 is xed on the pin. The Coulomb friction law is modied so that there exists a maximum critical frictional stress, above which the frictional stress stays constant and is no longer equal to the product of friction coefcient and the contact pressure. It is necessary to use this frictional contact interface in order to model the plastic shear ow behavior of the plate material when the applied shear stress is near the materials shear failure stress [17]. In this paper, a reasonable upper bound max = s / 3 is used, where s means the initial yield strength of the material. 2.4. Boundary conditions At the boundaries of the work plates to be joined, AB, BC, CD, and DA, material particles move with a constant speed u, relative to the pin, in the direction opposite to the translation movement of pin. Pin rotates with a certain angular velocity , as shown in Fig. 1. To obtain a more general conclusion, three cases of different process parameters are modeled, u = 2 mm and = 390 rpm, u = 4 mm and = 390 rpm, u = 2 mm and = 290 rpm, respectively. 2.5. Temperature eld The limitation of the PC computing power makes a thermo-mechanical nite element analysis of FSW impractical. To compensate the lack of a predicted temperature eld, actual temperature values from practical FSW test [18] will be used to construct an approximate temperature eld for the FSW process simulation, as shown in Fig. 3. In this test, the rotational speed of the pin is 400 rpm and the moving speed of the pin is 2 mm/s. The maximum temperature created by FSW ranges from 80 to 90% of the melting temperature of the welding material [2]. Due to the limitation

is dened by central difference operator: x (xt + 1/2 x)

= sym

During the solution, the elasticity relationship and the integrated rate decomposition are satised exactly, so that: c = Del : c (6)

where c is the correction to the stress, c the correction to the plastic strain increments and Del = 2 U/el el is the tangent elasticity matrix. If hardening laws are considered, then: c = h c + h h : c + c H (7)

where c is the correction to H , and c is the correction to . The ow rule is not satised exactly until the solution has been found: c c = g 2 g 2 g : c + c H pl (8)

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3. Results and discussions The movement of the material points on the advancing side is shown in Fig. 4 when u = 2 mm/s and = 390 rpm. Fig. 4(a) shows the initial location of material points. Fig. 4(b) and (c) show the movement of material points on the retreating side at t = 7.5 104 s and at t = 1.35 103 s, respectively. It can be seen in Fig. 4(b) the material points start to contact the pin and some of the material points start to rotate with the pin. The monitored material points form a uidized bed around the pin in Fig. 4(c). After several revolutions the material points start to slough off in the wake behind the pin in Fig. 4(d). It also can be seen that the speed of the material points in the wake is faster than those out of the wake, i.e. when the material points leave the rotational zone near the pin, the speed is higher than the translational one u. The initial locations of the material points on the retreating side are shown in Fig. 5(a) when u = 2 mm/s and = 390 rpm. Fig. 5(b) shows the movement of the material points on the retreating side at t = 7.5 104 s. The material points start to contact the pin and some of the material points start to be pushed due to the rotation of the pin. In Fig. 5(c) the monitored material points are pushed into the wake behind the pin but do not enter the rotational zone around the pin. All the monitored points are leaving the pin without any rotation around it in Fig. 5(d). To obtain the more general conclusions, the material behaviors under different process parameters are also discussed below. When the angular velocity of the pin is decreased from 390 to 290 rpm, the results of material behavior are shown in Figs. 6 and 7. The translational velocity of the pin is 2 mm/s in this case. It can be seen that the variation of the angular

Fig. 3. Fitted temperature history values at various distances from the weld line.

of the melting point of the material, the temperature elds near the pin under different cases do not have signicant differences. So the same temperature eld is used to model the friction stir welding process under different cases in this analysis. 2.6. Analysis of residual stress The stress will form in the weld during welding since the expansion of material occurs during the heating of the welded plates, followed by the contraction during the cooling of the welds. Furthermore, the rotational and the transverse movements of the tool will cause additional stress in the weld due to the mechanical constraint of the plates by the xture. The temperature of the plate will be reduced to 25 C and then the xture will be removed to obtain residual stress distributions.

Fig. 4. The material ow at advancing side when u = 2 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

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Fig. 5. The material ow at retreating side when u = 2 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

velocity has little inuence on the material behavior whether on the advancing side or on the retreating side. The possible reason for it is that the shear stress in the pinplate interface is limited by the critical shear stress max . The change of the angular velocity does not change the value of the critical shear stress signicantly. In these two gures, the same phenomenon of material ow can be observed. The material on the retreating side does not rotate with the pin but the one on the advancing side forms a rotational zone around the pin. After several revolutions the material points start to slough off in the wake behind the pin. When the translational velocity of the pin is increased from 2 to 4 mm/s, the results are shown in Figs. 8 and 9. In this

case, the angular velocity is 390 rpm. The same phenomenon of material behavior can be observed. It takes less time for the material points on the advancing side to slough off in the wake than those in the case u = 2mm/s, = 390 rpm. From the above three gures, it can be observed that the ow of the plate material on the advancing side and the retreating side are different. The material on the retreating side never enters into the rotational zone near the pin, but the material on the advancing side forms the uidized bed near the pin and rotates around it. After several revolutions the material on the advancing side starts to slough off in the wake behind the pin. Compared with the experimental data [19], the ow of the plate material is shown to

Fig. 6. The material ow at advancing side when u = 2 mm/s, = 290 rpm.

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Fig. 7. The material ow at retreating side when u = 2 mm/s, = 290 rpm.

demonstrate the validity of the model developed in this paper. Fig. 10 shows the distributions of radial and circumferential stress on the circle which is 0.25 mm away from the pinplate interface in the FSW process at t = 0.00375 s. The distribution of the radial stress is similar to the distribution of the circumferential one. The minimum of radial stress is near = 320 and the maximum near = 200 . The minimum of circumferential stress is near = 360 and the maximum near = 140 . When t = 0.0075 s, the curves

become atter, as shown in Fig. 11. It means that the material can hold the pin tightly to keep the FSW process continuing successfully. It is shown that time has little effect on the distributions of shear stress on the circle which is 0.25 mm away from the pinplate interface in Fig. 12. The distribution laws are very similar at different time t. The shear stress is limited by the critical shear stress and is certainly less than it. In fact, the material around the pin is very soft due to the increase of the temperature. So the material cannot bear larger shear force,

Fig. 8. The material ow at advancing side when u = 4 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

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Fig. 9. The material ow at retreating side when u = 4 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

which is the real cause for the shear stress to be equal or less than the critical shear stress max . Fig. 13 shows the distributions of equivalent plastic strain on the circles which are 0.25 and 0.84 mm away from the pinplate interface when u = 2 mm/s, = 390 rpm. In front

of the pin, 90 < < 180 , the equivalent plastic strain is much smaller than that behind the pin. It means that the material behind the pin is highly deformed especially in the regions of 0 < < 30 and 330 < < 360 . The region can be

Fig. 10. The radial stress and the circumferential stress near the pinplate interface in FSW process at t = 0.00375 s when u = 2 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

Fig. 12. The shear stress near the pinplate interface in FSW process at different time when u = 2 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

Fig. 11. The radial stress and the circumferential stress near the pinplate interface in FSW process at t = 0.0075 s when u = 2 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

Fig. 13. The equivalent plastic strain near pinplate interface when u = 2 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

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Fig. 14. The equivalent plastic strain near pinplate interface when u = 2 mm/s, = 290 rpm.

Fig. 16. The distributions of the longitudinal residual stress in the direction perpendicular to the welding line when u = 2 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

approximately corresponded with the wake behind the pin. When being away from the pinplate interface, the equivalent plastic strain is decreased except for the one in the region of 0 < < 30 and 330 < < 360 . The equivalent plastic strain distributions are believed to correlate well with the microstructure zones [15]. So it is studied in details in this paper. When u = 2 mm/s, = 290 rpm, the equivalent plastic strain distributions are shown in Fig. 14. Compared with the results in Fig. 13, the equivalent plastic strain in the region of 0 < < 30 and 330 < < 360 is decreased slightly. The maximum of the equivalent plastic strain occurs in the location where theta is approximately 15 and is decreased with the increase of the angular velocity of the pin. When the translational velocity is increased, the equivalent plastic strain is increased, as shown in Fig. 15, especially in the region of 0 < < 30 and 330 < < 360 . It means that with the increase of the translational velocity of the pin, the material in the wake becomes more highly deformed. The equivalent plastic strain distributions can be tted well with the ones obtained in Ref. [15], which shows the validity of the model used in this paper. Fig. 16 shows the distribution of residual stresses in the direction perpendicular to the welding line at y1 = 1mm, y1 = 2 mm, and y1 = 3 mm (x1 o1 y1 is a coordinate system xed on the pin, as shown in Fig. 1) when u = 2 mm/s, = 390 rpm. The maximum of the longitudinal residual stress

occurs near (R + 12) mm (R is the radius of the pin) away from the welding line. The longitudinal residual stress ranges from 100 MPa to about 100 Mpa. The range of the magnitude of the longitudinal residual stress can be tted approximately with the one in Ref. [9]. The distribution of the longitudinal residual stress is a double feature curve. The experimental data on residual stress distributions in references [2022] can also show that the longitudinal residual stress distributions along the direction perpendicular to the welding line are double feature curves, which shows the validity of the model established in this paper. It seems that the maximum longitudinal residual stress occurs in the location where the equivalent plastic strain is decreased dramatically, as shown in Fig. 17. The region of the large tensile residual stress can correlate approximately with the one of the large equivalent plastic strain. Where the equivalent plastic strain is decreasing, the longitudinal residual stress is decreasing. When being away from the exaction point of the pin, the longitudinal residual stress in the welding line is increasing. But after about 2 mm, the distribution of the longitudinal residual stress keeps steady. It means that the distributions of the longitudinal residual stress are not affected by the exaction of the pin after 2 mm away from the extraction point. Fig. 18 shows the distribution of the longitudinal residual stress in the direction perpendicular to the welding line when u = 2 mm/s, = 290 rpm. Compared the results in Fig. 16, the variation of the angular velocity has little effect on the longitudinal residual stress distribution. When the

Fig. 15. The equivalent plastic strain near pinplate interface when u = 4 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

Fig. 17. The distributions of the equivalent plastic strain in the direction perpendicular to the welding line when u = 2 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

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Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation (10302007, 10225212, 10421002) and the National Key Basic Research Special Foundation (G1999032805). The authors would like to thank Prof. Xiaomin Deng at University of South Carolina for his invaluable suggestions and discussions on this work.

References
Fig. 18. The distribution of the longitudinal residual stress in the direction perpendicular to the welding line when u = 2 mm/s, = 290 rpm. [1] W.M. Thomas, E.D. Nicholas, J.C. Need ham, M.G. Murch, P. Templesmith, C.J. Dawes, Friction Stir Welding, International Patent Application No. PCT/GB92102203 and Great Britain Patent Application No. 9125978.8, 1991. [2] W. Tang, X. Guo, J.C. McClure, L.E. Murr, A. Nunes, J. Mater. Process. Manuf. Sci. 7 (1998) 163172. [3] S. Xu, X. Deng, A.P. Reynolds, T.U. Seidel, Sci. Technol. Weld. Joining 6 (2001) 191193. [4] L.E. Murr, Y. Li, R.D. Flores, Mater. Res. Innov. 2 (1998) 150 153. [5] K. Colligan, Weld. J. 78 (7) (1999) 229237. [6] L.E. Murr, E.A. Trillo, Y. Li, R.D. Flores, B.M. Nowack, J.C. McClure, Min. Met. Mater. Soc. (1999) 3137. [7] Y. Li, L.E. Murr, J.C. McCluure, Mater. Sci. Eng. A 271 (1999) 213271. [8] D. Dalle, G. Biallas, T. Ghidini, Second International Symposium on Friction Stir Welding, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2000, pp. 26 28. [9] P.J. Webster, L.D. Oosterkamp, P.A. Brown, J. Strain Anal. 36 (1) (2000) 6170. [10] M.A. Sutton, A.P. Reynolds, D.Q. Wang, C.R. Hubbard, J. Eng. Mater. Technol. 124 (4) (2002) 215221. [11] C.B. Smith, G.B. Bendzsak, T.H. North, J.F. Hinrichs, J.S. Noruk, R.J. Heideman, in: T. Siewert, C. Pollock (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference in Computer Technology in Welding, Detroit, 2000. [12] T.U. Seidel, A.P. Reynolds, The 12th Annual Advanced Aerospace Materials and Processes Conference and Exposition, Long Beach, California, 2001, pp. 1114. [13] X.M. Deng, S.W. Xu, Transactions of NAMRI/SME (2001) 631 638. [14] X.M. Deng, S.W. Xu, J. Manuf. Process. 6 (2) (2004) 125 133. [15] S.W. Xu, X.M. Deng, CD-ROM Proceedings of the 21st Southeastern Conference on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, 2002, pp. 699704. [16] W.F. Brown Jr., H. Mindlin, C.Y. Ho, Aerospace Structural Metals Handbook, CINDAS/procedure university, 1993. [17] ABAQUS Theory Manual, Version 6.4, Hibbit, Karlsson, and Sorensen Inc., 2003. [18] J.C. McClure, Z. Feng, W. Tang, J.E. Gould, L.E. Murr, X. Guo, in: J.M. Virtek, et al. (Eds.), Trends in Welding Research, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Trends in Welding Research, Pine Mountain, GA, 1998, pp. 590595. [19] M. Guerra, C. Schmidt, J.C. McClure, L.E. Murr, A.C. Nunes, Mater. Charact. 49 (2003) 95101. [20] M. Ya, F.L. Dai, J. Lv, Weld. J. 23 (5) (2002) 5356. [21] P. Staron, M. Kocak, S. Williams, A. Wescott, Phys. B 350 (2004) 491493. [22] A.P. Reynolds, W. Tang, T. Gnaupel-Herold, H. Prask, Scripta Mater. 48 (2003) 12891294.

Fig. 19. The distribution of the longitudinal residual stress in the direction perpendicular to the welding line when u = 4 mm/s, = 390 rpm.

translational velocity is increased, the maximum longitudinal residual stress is increased from 100 to 110 Mpa, as shown in Fig. 19. The longitudinal residual stress is always positive near the welding line but negative out of the region 10 mm < x1 < 10 mm.

4. Conclusions A two-dimensional model is developed for FSW of an Alalloy, in order to build qualitative framework to understand the mechanism of FSW process and the distributions of the residual stress of the welding plate. 1) Material on the advancing front side of a weld forms a uidized bed around the pin and slough off in the wake after several revolutions but the material on the retreating side never rotates with the pin. 2) The material behind the pin is highly deformed especially in the regions of 0 < < 30 and 330 < < 360 . 3) The maximum longitudinal residual stress occurs near (R + 12) mm away from the welding line. 4) The region of the large tensile residual stress can correlate approximately with the one of the large equivalent plastic strain. 5) With the increase of the translational velocity of the pin, the maximum longitudinal residual stress is increased.

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