a cooler weld

An emerging joining technology lets manufacturers rethink how products fit together.
By Matt Hansen
The Eclipse 500, which made its first test flight last August, is designed as a means to get around the system. It is a
personal twinjet aircraft that can carry four to five passengers. The manufacturer says it will have a range of 1,300 nautical
miles, or about 2,400 kilometers, and cruising speed of 355 knots, or more than 650 km an hour. That performance will
give the jet access to thousands of municipal airports across the United States. These are the airports that don't have the
runways or facilities to handle the large commercial jets (read: no traffic or crowds).

Distinguished By Price

Other small jets can do that, too. What distinguishes this one is its price: under $1
million.

The manufacturer, Eclipse Aviation Corp. of Albuquerque, N.M., says that is

approximately one-fourth of the cost of a comparable small jet aircraft. The company
has attributed the low price partly to design and manufacturing efficiencies made
possible by a low-temperature joining technology called friction stir welding. Major
assemblies are being manufactured with the process.
The manufacturer of the Eclipse 500 twinjet says friction stir welding of major components will bring the airplane in at a purchase price under
$1 million; 263 welds replaced more than 7,000 fasteners.

Friction stir welding uses a cylindrical, shouldered tool with a profiled pin that is rotated and slowly plunged into the joint
line between two pieces of sheet or plate material. Frictional heat between the wear-resistant welding tool and the
workpiece causes the metal to soften without reaching the melting point and allows the tool to traverse the weld line.

As it does, the plasticized material is extruded around the pin. A solid-phase bond with extremely fine-grain structure is
the result.
Without the shoulder the extruded material would move up along the pin and create a rooster or fantail, since the material
is solid and not self-leveling.

MTS Systems Corp. of Eden Prairie, Minn., is one of a handful of companies licensed to market equipment for friction stir
welding, which is often called FSW, and has been Eclipse's supplier. The technology was developed about a dozen years
ago by The Welding Institute, a membership-based research and technology organization in Cambridge, England.

Fewer Riveted Joints

According to Brent Christner, the materials and process engineering lead at Eclipse, stir welding eliminated 60 percent of
the rivets that the plane would have otherwise required. In a presentation to the International Council of Aeronautical
Sciences last year, Christner reported that in side-by-side tests, friction stir welded joints had two or more times the static
strength of a comparable yet conservatively designed riveted joint. Fatigue properties of stir welded joints were found to
be at least as good as those of riveted joints.

Eclipse estimates that FSW reduces process time for assemblies by two-thirds; that is, stir welded assemblies will take 1.2
shifts to complete, versus 3.6 shifts for automatically riveted assemblies. Stir welding also eliminates rivet costs, as well as
any handling and overhead costs associated with fasteners.
Eclipse is building a separate plant to house its stir welding operations for commercial production, once its plane receives
certification by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. The 50,000-square-foot plant, which is due to be completed this
spring, will be able to house equipment to turn out as many as 1,500 airplanes a year.

FSW for use in commercial and private aircraft has been an area of interest for a number of companies. Boeing and Airbus
both have been developing the process for aircraft for a number of years, and Airbus has plans to use the process for skin-
to-skin butt welds on various aircraft. Many smaller aircraft manufacturers and components suppliers are also developing
FSW for various
applications.

In the past decade, friction stir welding has been developed for many diverse industries, not only in aerospace, but also in
automotive, marine, and nuclear assemblies.

Marine Aluminum of Norway uses FSW to join long aluminum extrusions into flat panels and was the first manufacturer
to use stir welding in production. The panels most commonly are used as decks and bulkheads in fast ferries.
A stir welding system used by Eclipse Aviation has completed part of a aircraft cabin skin. The
company says it also uses the process on the fuselage and wing skin, and each aircraft has a total
136 meters of welds.

A number of automotive companies have been developing stir welding for various
applications. Stir welding has been used successfully to create suspension
components, crash boxes, and wheel rims. One of the production applications is the
joining of two extruded panels for a seat frame. Tower Automotive Inc., based in
Grand Rapids, Mich., is using FSW to create tailored blanks by joining extrusions.
These blanks are then sliced perpendicular to the weld direction, and the resulting
component is used as a suspension arm.

SKB, the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Co., has purchased a stir welding system that seals vessels used
for containing spent nuclear fuel rods.

Meanwhile, Boeing has been using stir welding for the past few years to build its Delta rockets.

The rockets were originally manufactured using gas metal arc welding and variable polarity arc welding, depending on the
joint. While it's been successful, the fusion welding process had high costs associated with rework and joint preparation.
The fusion welding processes averaged a weld defect every 330 inches, or every 8 3/8 meters.

According to a paper by Dave Nicholas of The Welding Institute, during the first four years in which Boeing used stir
welding to manufacture Delta rockets, it produced over 2.5 km of continuous defect-free welds. This improvement
resulted in a cost savings of several hundred thousand dollars per year.

There are additional savings in the preparation stage; fusion welded edges need to be etched prior to welding, while FSW
requires only a solvent wipe.

Friction stir welding is a solid-state process, more similar to forging and extruding than to fusion welding.

No Filler Material Required

FSW does not require consumables in the same sense as fusion welding. The process is autogenous, meaning that filler
material is not required. Cover gases are also not required in many cases, although the use of a cover gas has proved
beneficial for titanium and steels.

Unlike fusion welding, stir welding does not emit radiation, so welding curtains and face shields are not required. Some
people have said that FSW is one of the most boring processes to watch. Without sparks, fumes, or chips, the only thing to
watch is a machine quietly stir welding parts together.

Stir welding does not rely on an experienced operator with the right touch, because the process has a near-zero defect rate.
Given a well-designed and integrated FSW system, the process is extremely robust.

Various sources have cited joint strength increases as high as 30 percent when compared to fusion welding. The joints also
have much higher elongation than fusion welding, as much as two or three times more, depending on the alloy and heat
treatment. This higher elongation increases the energy absorption in the weld prior to failure, which is beneficial for high
shock applications.

Since the process is solid state, the joint is not subject to any shrinkage as a result of phase changes. The process also
introduces minimal heat into the weld, so the heat-affected zone is relatively small in comparison to arc welding.

Welding the Unweldable

Potentially, the biggest advantage for FSW is the ability to join unweldable aluminum
alloys. FSW is routinely used to join 2XXX and 7XXX series aluminums. Fusion
welds in these alloys can have high defect rates or are too brittle to be useful. Stir
welding can be used to join dissimilar aluminum alloys as well.

The better material properties can also cut expenses by reducing material costs.
Sources at Boeing have said that stir welded joints have shown 30 to 50 percent
increases in tensile strength, fracture toughness, and fatigue strength at both room and
cryogenic temperatures. The increase in strength may permit an increase in payload, a
decrease in joint thickness to save weight, or a reduction in processing costs for the rocket skins.

Boeing has also been able to salvage a rocket that was built using fusion welding that had been declared unusable from a
quality standpoint. To repair the rocket, Boeing decided to stir weld directly through the fusion weld. The repair procedure
was successful, and the rocket was declared launch-worthy.

NASA and Lockheed Martin plan to install a large stir welding system to build the Space Shuttle's external fuel tank, shown in this rendering
as the dome at right, of a superior alloy that resisted conventional fusion welding.

NASA has a plan, in the works before the loss of Columbia and its crew, to use stir welding to improve the external fuel
tank of the Space Shuttle. The new tank will use a superior alloy, Al-Li 2195.
Although the Al-Li 2195 was known to offer strength and density improvements over the Al 2219 alloy currently used in
the tank, difficulties encountered during the fusion welding process adversely affected productivity.

Engineers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. have successfully
demonstrated the fabrication by friction stir welding of a full-scale tank barrel using Al-Li 2195.

A universal welding system from MTS Systems is being installed at NASA's Michoud assembly facility in New Orleans.
The system will be operated and maintained by Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

As part of NASA's Next Generation Launch Technologies Program, the Michoud unit will stir weld full-size test panels
representative of a dome section of a reusable cryogenic tank. The five-axis friction stir welding system with a horizontal-
boom configuration will have a welding envelope of 16 feet by 20.5 feet by 10 feet, the largest envelope of any stir welder
in the world. After completion of the representative dome section, Lockheed will use the system for various production
programs for itself and other equipment manufacturers.

Friction stir welding has gained a significant level of acceptance in a relatively short time. You may already be using
something that contains stir welded parts and not even realize it—maybe that commuter train in Japan or ferry in Europe,
or even a pair of B&O stereo speakers.

In the coming years, MTS Systems expects the process to become even more widely accepted as manufacturers take
advantage of the benefits provided by a simple and robust joining process—welding that really isn't.

Matt Hansen is a systems engineer with MTS Systems Corp. in Eden Prairie, Minn.