Review of Microstructural and Mechanical Properties of Microwave Welding of Lightweight Alloys

1. Introduction

Due to the rising need for energy worldwide, renewable energy is now thought to be the most popular energy source. The total amount of harvested renewable energy has been greatly boosted by hydroelectric electricity. Stations that produce hydroelectric power frequently use authenticate stainless steel. Additionally, a wide number of industries, including petrochemical, aerospace, defence, shipbuilding, and cryogenic stations, use stainless steel that contains nitrogen (Rajan et al., 2018). The developing method of material processing that is non-intrusive, eco-friendly, and energy-efficient is microwave processing. In this method, materials are processed for a variety of purposes, including boring, moulding, impurity, covering, thawing, and attaching, using electromagnetic energy at specific frequencies within the microwave energy spectrum. There have been numerous studies on microwave casting and drilling of various types of materials (Ajay et al., 2023, Kumar et al., 2023), including metals, glass, Perspex, and, ceramics with reassuring results reported. Similar research has been done and is being done in the field of microwave sintering, including treating different types of electronic and biomaterials materials. Additionally, microwave coating/cladding was reported for employing microwave radiation to process high melting point materials such WC-12Co cermet; the produced clad were stated to have better wear resistance and frictional qualities (Chowdhury et al., 2011).

The ability of a substance to effectively absorb a given amount of electromagnetic (EM) energy determines how well it may be heated. However, it is fairly possible for a variety of materials to heat very fast when employing EM energy than when using standard heating methods. Microwaves with a frequency spectrum of 305 MHz to 305 GHz are discovered to be particularly efficient in the operation of material refining in the EM spectrum. When compared to traditional heating techniques, microwave processing offers the potential to boost material and energy efficiency. Energy movement is not a restricted level of matter in microwave processing; instead, heat can be transferred to all particles, increasing the rate at which heat is transferred with a microwave The inverse heating profile is observed because, during processing, heating is volume-dependent rather than surface-dependent. The efficiency of electromagnetic radiation's conversion to heat is close to 100%. Since energy is delivered using microwaves, which have the quality to break surface layers, a new climate figure exists for warm-up clarification. The microwave thawing method was first used to heat food before expanding its function to include the clarification of a different range of matter, including slip wares, polymaths, and complex; it now has many uses in the processing of fusible matters as well. The sintering, joining, and coating/cladding of fusible matter using oven heat have seen a sharp increase in interest in recent years (Kumar et al., 2022). Growing awareness is one cause of the growing interest. However, because most metals reflect electromagnetic waves under normal circumstances, using microwaves to process metallic materials is a difficult field of research. Now composition has revealed actual little study in the domain of treating fusible material using sintering under certain situations. Additionally, effort has been done on weld particular materials bottom particular circumstances. It has also been documented that bulk metallic objects can be joined in a variety of ways using a home microwave device (Bozkurt et al., 2011).