NUMERICAL SIMULATION ON JOINING OF CERAMICS WITH METAL BY FRICTION WELDING TECHNIQUE

The joining of ceramic and metals can be done by different techniques such as ultrasonic joining, brazing, transient liquid phase diffusion bonding, and friction welding. Friction Welding is a solid state joining process that generates heat through mechanical friction between a moving workpiece and a stationary component. In this article, numerical simulation on thermal analysis of friction welded ceramic/metal joint has been carried out by using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software. The finite element analysis helps in better understanding of the friction welding process of joining ceramics with metals and it is important to calculate temperature and stress fields during the welding process. Based on the obtained temperature distribution the graphs were plotted between the lengths of the joint corresponding to the temperatures. To increase the wettability, aluminium sheet was used as an interlayer. Hence, numerical simulation of friction welding process is done by varying the interlayer sheet thickness. Transient thermal analysis had been carried out for each cases and temperature distribution was studied. From the simulation studies, it is found that the increase in interlayer thickness reduces the heat affected zone and eventually improves the joint efficiency of alumina/aluminum alloy joints.