Tailor welded blanks (TWB) in Al alloys are an attractive structural solution for application in the shipbuilding sector, mainly due to reductions in weight and lower production costs. In the present study, the global and local mechanical properties of dissimilar friction stir welded TWB were assessed. The joints were manufactured with dissimilar Al-Mg alloys and thicknesses (6 and 8 mm) of particular interest to the shipbuilding sector (AA5083 and AA5059). A digital image correlation system (DIC) linked to a tensile test system was used to characterise the local strain fields, and true stress-strain curves were generated for several TWB sub-zones. Microhardness and DIC analyses showed that the stir zone of the TWB presented overmatching in relation to the weakest base material, and that the joints displayed excellent overall mechanical performance that was comparable to the AA5059 base material in terms of strength and ductility. The fatigue strength was evaluated by means of tension-tension fatigue tests, and the TWB joints reached the fatigue keen with a stress range of 70MPa.
The ultrasonic joining process was recently introduced as an alternative concept to join through-the-thickness reinforced metal-composite hybrid structures. In this work, the investigation of joining process parameters effect on the joint mechanical performance of Ti-6Al-4V-glass-fiber-reinforced polyetherimide overlap joints was carried out by Box-Behnken design of experiments. The individual and combined effects of joining energy, sonotrode oscillation amplitude, and joining pressure on the ultimate lap shear force were elucidated by response surfaces method and analysis of variance. As a result of this study, a set of optimized joining parameters were obtained to produce joints with high ultimate lap shear force. The obtained reliable reduced model (R2 = 82%) displays a major influence of joining energy (25.3%) and sonotrode oscillation amplitude (21.2%) on the joint mechanical performance. Two-way interaction response surfaces were used to support strategies to optimize the maximum ultimate lap shear force. By comparing the optimized joint condition produced in this work with previously published results an improvement of 79% in ultimate lap shear force was attained, thereby, proving the potential of the proposed process optimization procedure.
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