Application of Laser-Based Additive Manufacturing to Production of Tools for Friction Stir Welding
Abstract
This paper presents a feasibility study of application of laser-based additive
manufacturing to production of tools for friction-stir welding (FSW) of materials. The design
and rapid manufacturing of powerful tools has become one of the major challenges in expanding
the application of FSW processes to new materials. The one-step laser cladding process is
capable of creating a novel, fully dense and metallurgically bonded near-net-shape tool with
microstructural and compositional gradients. In this paper, two kinds of FSW-tool materials are
developed and evaluated for the applications of welding different materials. A pure H13 tool
steel powder is used to build a FSW-tool for welding the materials with relatively low melting
temperatures, such as aluminum alloys. A WC-based ceramet/tool steel functionally graded
material (FGM) is synthesized to build a FSW-tool in order to weld the materials with higher
melting temperatures and highly abrasive materials such as MMC materials. By controlling the
amount of different supplied powders under the optimized laser cladding conditions, WC-based
ceramet/tool steel FGMs are successfully synthesized layer by layer. FSW experiments are
carried out to evaluate the deposited tools.