Weld Bead Characteristic of Gas Metal Arc Welding-Cold Metal Transfer (GMAW-CMT)

Abstract

The purpose of this paper to study the effect of welding speed, contact tip to work distance and material thickness on weld characteristic of GMAW-CMT process of AA6351.The effect of varying the GMAW-CMT process parameters on the process responses such as weld bead width and weld bead height have been investigated. The source of aluminum alloy used in this study was aluminum alloy AA 6351 material. The aluminum alloy 6351 was in plate shape having two dimensions of the raw material in this sample preparation which is 150mmx 53mmx 5 mm and 150mmx 53 mm x 6mm. The weld bead measurement activities were carried out using the welding gauge. The works were conducted at Surface Laboratory in UNIKL MITEC, Malaysia. The weld gauges used in this study is made of stainless steel material. Two types of weld gauges namely MG-8 Cam and insize were used for evaluate the weld bead width and height of AA6351.The MG-8 cam gauge is a simple tool for measured the weld bead height of welded joint AA6351 whereas the weld bead width measurements were taken using insize weld gauge.It was found that welding speed, contact tip to work distance and material thickness give significant effect on weld bead width and weld bead height of AA6351. An increase in welding speed causes an increase in weld bead height. Meanwhile, the weld bead width increased when welding speed decreased.This study improves our understanding on the implication of different welding paramaters setting and potentially decreases the size of weld bead geometry.Thus current values of welding speed,contact tip to work distance and material thickness can be used for perform better result.