Magnetic pulse welding of dissimilar material sheet metal joints

Environmental protection and saving of energy and resources increasingly influences industrial manufacturing. Thus an increasing demand for lightweight construction approaches can be observed. Multi-material design is a well-known strategy allowing weight savings, higher product performance and cost reduction at the same time, but the realization of optimized multi-material products is frequently limited by the joining technology. Magnetic pulse welding is a promising innovative approach for joining material combinations conventionally considered as non-weldable. Collision parameter based welding windows, which are well known from explosive welding, can be a powerful tool in the design of MPW processes, too, because they are independent from all parameters specific for the individual equipment or setup. However, using these welding windows in practice is complicated, because collision parameters cannot be directly adjusted and informative value regarding resulting weld quality is limited. Therefore, a process analysis of magnetic pulse welding of sheet metal lap joints was performed studying the correlations between the most important adjustable process parameters, the collision parameters and important weld quality characterizing parameters for different material combinations and flyer thicknesses.