Ultrasonic phased arrays are a new technology that offers considerable potential for inspecting construction welds. Using electronic control of the beam, phased arrays can scan, sweep, steer and focus the ultrasound. Since welds typically produce defects of known character and orientation, phased arrays can be programmed to optimize weld inspections. These inspections include standard ASME-type...

The shear textures that develop in friction stir welds are reviewed and discussed. In all the materials examined, including face centred cubic (fcc), body centred cubic (bcc) and hexagonal close-packed (hcp) materials, friction stir welding produces a predominant shear texture with the close-packed directions aligned with the shear direction (SD) and the close-packed plane normal perpendicular ...

Resistance spot welding is the most preferred and widely used method for joining metal sheets in automotive and many other industrial assembly operations. The body of a car is typically joined by thousands of spot welds. One of the many geometrical factors affecting the final geometrical outcome of the metal part assemblies is the welding process considering welding sequence used when the parts...

One current methodology for spotweld modelling utilizes a tied contact to connect the weld elements to the components. In order for this contact to be robust and acceptably mesh independent, multiple solid elements are needed to represent a single weld. Several studies were conducted which concluded that a cluster of eight hex elements provides significantly improved performance over a single b...

Laser welding has been increasingly utilized to manufacture a variety of components thanks to its high quality and speed. For components with complex shapes, the welding position needs be continuously adjusted during laser welding, which makes it necessary to know the effects of the welding position on the quality of the laser welds. In this paper, the weld quality under two (flat and horizonta...

A nondestructive study of the internal structure and compositional gradient of dissimilar metal-alloy welds through energy-resolved neutron imaging is described in this paper. The ability of neutrons to penetrate thick metal objects (up to several cm) provides a unique possibility to examine samples which are opaque to other conventional techniques. The presence of Bragg edges in the measured n...

In the automotive industry, a barrier to widespread implementation of friction stir welding (FSW) for aluminum joining is the perceived need for high cost, custom capital machinery. The reason for this perception is that the FSW process requires relatively large forces that commonly used automation machinery (e.g. an industrial robot) has difficulty producing. Further complicating the issue, is...

The height of the unwelded root part in T and X welds whose length exceeds the sound-beam width at the contact point between the sound and the reflector can according to methods known today only be estimated by applying the tandem technique with two ultrasonic transverse probes from one single access area, or two access areas, the latter usually not possible in practice. However, with sheets ha...