North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
North America's Largest Metal Forming, Fabricating, Welding and Finishing Event
By: Dan Barry, Coldwater Machine Company
The use of lightweight materials is predicted to grow significantly within the automotive sector. The majority of content will come from Advanced High Strength Steel with remaining lightweight content a mix of aluminum, magnesium, plastics and carbon fiber.
The advantage of Advanced High Strength Steel is that it’s typically compatible with existing manufacturing processes. However, what the future seems to hold is a multi-materials strategy among automakers. The key to success will be finding ways to make these multiple materials work together. Implementing multi-material solutions can be a difficult due to the problematic joining challenges and corrosion issues that result from vastly different material properties.
Friction Welding Offers Joining Alternative
Friction welding has proven an effective process in overcoming dissimilar materials joining challenges. Nearly half of the welds made through friction welding are for joining of dissimilar materials. Normally the wide difference in melting points of the two materials would make it impossible to weld using traditional techniques, and would require some sort of mechanical connection. Friction welding provides a “full strength” bond with no additional weight.
It works by creating mechanical friction between workpieces in relative motion to one another, heating the materials until they reach a plastic state (non-melting) at the joint interface. The materials are then forged together to create a joint. Friction welding offers numerous benefits over other joining techniques including elimination of filler metal or flux, higher quality joints, a very small heat affected area, and no coarse grain formation.
Friction welding can be applied as friction spin (or rotary) welding, linear friction stir welding (LFSW or FSW) or refill friction stir spot welding (RFSSW), as well as multiple variants of each approach. While most rotary friction welding is used on round, symmetrical parts; linear friction stir welding and RFFSW allow solid state welds on a wider range of part geometries. Currently, RFSSW has become a focus as a solution for spot welding aluminum and dissimilar materials with potential to replace single-point joining processes like resistance spot welding and riveting.
Coldwater Friction Welding SystemsIn booth #A3274 at FABTECH 2017, Coldwater Machine Company will showcase its automated SpinMeldTM friction spin welding system, a joining technology for dissimilar and exotic materials that normally may not be welded using other methods. SpinMeld eliminates the need for post process inspection of the weld joint because all the welding parameters are controlled and monitored in-process so bad parts can be rejected immediately.
The SpinMeld process can improve quality and lower the cost to manufacture a wide range of applications where a high strength, non-porous joint is needed. Servo-controlled with a high-speed spindle, the process is very fast, with weld times typically under 3 seconds, enabling it to replace other processes including arc, resistance and projection welding with better results. Coldwater has designed dozens of its SpinMeld™ systems for installation at a variety of Tier suppliers and OEMs in both automotive and non-automotive markets.
Additionally, for sheet metal applications, Coldwater offers its SpotMeld™ robotic joining system for joining aluminum, magnesium, non-ferrous and dissimilar materials. Based upon RFSSW technology, these production-ready systems can handle volumes required for high production environments, and can be mounted on any industrial robot or retrofit for replacement of existing processes. Compared to laser welding and other aluminum-joining techniques, SpotMeld is an easier process to fixture and it’s more tolerant of imperfections. It is also designed to have the same basic footprint and work envelope as a resistance spot-weld robot, putting it in a familiar context for OEMs.
Contact Information
Dan Barry
Coldwater Machine Company
(419) 678-4877
dbarry@coldwatermachine.com
FABTECH 2024
About the Expo
North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
