Goal is to further develop Refill Friction Stir Spot Welding for Aerospace Alloy
Coldwater Machine Company announced that it is an industry partner participating in the LIFT Consortium’s Processing and Properties Database for Refill Friction Stir Spot Welding of Aerospace Material stechnology project. This project, being led by Boeing and the Edison Welding Institute (EWI), will validate and further develop refill friction stir spot welding (RFSSW) using aerospace alloys. The outcome will be a standards database that includes process parameters and mechanical properties that help drive guidelines to provide product designers in the aerospace industry with the technical data to develop designs that can take advantage of RFSSW’s benefits.
This project, being led by Boeing and the Edison Welding Institute (EWI), will validate and further develop refill friction stir spot welding (RFSSW) using aerospace alloys. The outcome will be a standards database that includes process parameters and mechanical properties that help drive guidelines to provide product designers in the aerospace industry with the technical data to develop designs that can take advantage of RFSSW’s benefits.
“Coldwater is excited to bring our friction welding expertise and Spotmeld™ technology to this project, helping to drive the use of RFSSW, allowing the elimination of rivets in aerospace structures,” said Vice President of Sales, Dan Barry.
Coldwater is experienced in the rotary friction welding of a variety of dissimilar materials as well as friction spot joining of 1000-8000 series aluminum. Its contributing to this project by testing RFSSW and documenting the data for joining aluminum grades to eliminate rivets and drive better process control for joining lightweight materials. The project is expected to be complete by October 2018.
Existing single-point joining processes like resistance spot welding, laser welding and rivetingtechnologies needed to process lighter materials typically add weight or cost, result in low weld strength, or have porosity defects. Refill friction stir spot welding, such as Coldwater’s SpotMeld technology, overcomes these issues, providing superior joint strength with a production ready technology that can be delivered as an EOAT on a robotics-based solution or integrated to a wide variety of CNC solutions.
