Lightweight materials and their alloys are increasingly used in automobiles and aircraft due to their high specific strength and strength and weight ratio. The characteristics of aluminium materials and their alloys make applying traditional mechanical joining and welding processes difficult. Recently much research has been conducted to obtain reliable and high mechanical strength joints on aluminium alloys using various methods of joining process. This chapter provides a detailed review of recent research on nanoparticle-influenced friction stir welding on different aluminium alloys. The latest advancements and application of nanoparticle reinforcements in the joining behaviour of aluminium alloys are also systematically described. Finally, several unaddressed issues and future development in joining aluminium alloys with the addition of nanoparticles are included.
Top1. Introduction
Lightweight alloys such as Aluminium, Magnesium, Titanium, and Copper are potential engineering alloys from research and industrial point of view. These alloys have become more significant in transport manufacturing, including aircraft, cars, heavy trucks, trains, ships, and defense products (Daehn, 2014; Danish et al., 2018; Mayyas et al., 2016)(Ravikumar et al., 2020). These alloys are appealing for steel structures in some engineering applications due to their characteristics, such as a high strength-to-weight ratio, effective heat conductivity, and excellent damping capacity (Sukkasamy & Gopal P. M., 2022)(Madesh et al., 2022).
Methods to join similar or dissimilar lightweight alloys are becoming more critical in manufacturing structures in engineering applications (Subramani et al., 2019) (Ulutaş, 2022) (Subramani et al., 2019). To consistently join these lightweight alloys, suitable joining methods are required. Joining methods include mechanical fastening, adhesive bonding, welding, brazing, and soldering (Thorny et al., 2007). Mechanical fastening and adhesive bonding result in no microstructural evaluation, as no heat is involved. Whereas fusion welding processes such as shielded metal arc welding, gas metal arc welding, and gas tungsten arc welding lead to metallurgical mismatching in the weld of dissimilar materials in metal-to-metal joints.
Figure 1.
Schematics of friction stir spot welding process
Emerging joining processes, such as friction stir welding, laser welding, and ultrasonic welding, are considered more feasible to join lightweight alloys (J. Yang et al., 2022) (Boopathi et al., 2022). Friction stir welding (FSW) is a solid-state joining method with low energy input. FSW enhances the fabrication and processing of lightweight alloy joints, which are challenging to do with other welding processes due to no melting involved (Sudhagar et al., 2019). In this method, coalescence is initiated by applying localized heat generated by the stirring action of the non-consumable rotating tool with a modest clamping force (Fig .1).
Tool rotation speed, tool traverse speed, and tool plunge fore are the significant process parameters of FSW (Sasikala et al., 2022)(S. M et al., 2021). Friction spot joining is similar to linear friction stir welding. However, the tool does not travel linearly, including plunging, stirring, and retracting (Suresh, Venkatesan, Natarajan, et al., 2019) (Suresh, Elango, et al., 2020). Recently, many researchers developed a new lightweight metal that welded with friction stir welded with the addition of ceramic nanoparticles that could pave the way for super-strong yet high-performance lightweight metals (Casati & Vedani, 2014)(V. Sharma et al., 2015) (Suresh S et al., 2022). They have concentrated on the use of nanoparticles in the FSW process, the production of composite matrixes, and the implications of these processes on mechanical properties. However, little study has been done on nanoparticle-reinforced dissimilar lightweight joints.