A Numerical and Experimental Approach to Study the Parametric Effect of Ultrasonic Welding

Abstract

In today’s world, aluminium and its alloy is showing promising characteristics for replacing other materials due its excellent properties like light weight, corrosion resistance, high strength and toughness. Conventional welding for these materials creates some challenges like porosity, hot cracking and void formation. Ultrasonic welding gives some ultimate solution to these problems as the material experience only 30% of its melting point temperature. Ultrasonic welding is a creative system for joining metals and composites rapidly and safely owing to a high-frequency vibration consolidated with pressure. The process has a widespread application in electrical, automotive, aerospace, medical and packaging industry. In the present research work, a numerical model is proposed for the evaluation of heat generation due to deformation and friction during welding. The developed model is equipped for predicting the interface temperature and stress distribution during ultrasonic welding and their impacts on sonotrode, anvil and welded parts. The effect of tool (sonotrode) shape also studied. Response surface methodology (RSM) with Box-Behnken design has been implemented to design the experimental setup and establish a co-relation between process parameters viz. pressure, amplitude and welding time with the output response as tensile strength. RSM is coupled with desirability function is utilized to optimize the parameters for a desired tensile strength of the joint. The result of numerical model is compared with the experimental value and found to be in good agreement.