MTI Whiteboard Wednesdays: Understanding Weld Development

Thanks for joining me for MTI’s Whiteboard Wednesdays. I’m Dan Adams. Today, we’re talking about development and more specifically, four important steps for your next weld development project. 

In this episode of Whiteboard Wednesday, we want to talk about the weld development process. At the end of the day, we want you to be able to weld a component on a production machine and make sure that that component is fit for purpose and meets all of your print tolerances. So, how do we get there? 

So, we go through a weld development process in order to make sure that every weld that you get is what you want it to be. Now, if you’re using a traditional friction welding process or if you have experience in friction welding, you may just jump into phase two, where we’re making a weld on a dummy component. It’s basically a coupon, but it is the same sort of wall thickness and geometry, but with tooling that already exists. So even though the weld interface might be lower, the clamping surfaces might be larger. 

And we do this so that you can do a little bit of testing, you can get the metallurgy that you want, you can look at the flash morphology-all those sorts of things happen in phase two.

But we do it with less expensive tooling because by the time we want to tool a production part, that tooling may be much more complicated. It might be more expensive. So we want to be able to prove that the process works inexpensively before we ask you to invest in production-grade tooling. 

Now, once we’ve done the production-grade tooling samples for you, you may exit the weld development at that point in time, because you’re familiar with the friction welding process and how to make a robust manufacturing process out of it. So we’ll come back to that.

But in Low Force Friction Welding, you may not be as experienced with that technology, so the first step is, we want to prove to you that we can get good welds. And we do that with smaller coupons. 

We will demonstrate the wall thickness of your component or the geometry on something that we can quickly and easily demonstrate. We’re not worried about flash morphology. We’re just worried about the weld integrity and the metallurgy. 

So this gives us a really inexpensive way to demonstrate that the weld will be fit for purpose, and then we can go back to scalability. 

Now we can go to a full-size sample that again has maybe an enlarged clamping surface, but the right wall thickness and weld area, so that you can do some testing.

Once we get through the testing, then again we go back to production tooling. Now you’re making a little bit more of an investment. But at this point, we know that the process is working for you, and we can demonstrate parts that you can test in your normal test rig. 

Now, the last step of the process, phase four is about making sure that we have a robust manufacturing process. So any of your incoming components, the variations that you might have, they might be in metallurgy, they might be in machining-all those variations are studied to make sure that when the welder says you have a good part, that you, in fact, have a good part, that is fit for purpose and meets all of your manufacturing tolerances. 

And that’s why we go through such a robust development phase so that we can make sure that you get the right part every time.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of MTI’s Whiteboard Wednesdays. For more information on this topic or other friction welding solutions, please visit our website at mtiwelding.com