ADVANCED COOLING TECHNOLOGIES INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF181-051

Description

Welding of aerospace structural components is an expensive process due to high material cost of titanium alloys, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions. Linear friction welding (LFW) is a solid state process of joining materials together through frictional contact. Due its several advantages like absence of solidification defects and additional heat source, the technique is increasing attracting attention in aerospace industry. However, there is a need to develop process modeling capabilities, which enable optimization and effective of LFW.Commercially available finite element software are limited to modeling of linear friction welding in 2D using Finite Element Method (FEM) with Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian adaptive mesh controls. However, 2D modeling does not allow for full and accurate accounting of deformation in all directions at the weld line. Currently, there is no means to effectively model LFW process in 3D structural components. 3D process modeling via FEM with adaptive meshing technique is computationally expensive, and presents numerical errors due to extensive distortion of elements.ACT proposes to develop a novel approach for process modeling of friction welding in 3D. The approach will handle the deformation and weld processes of LFW efficiently and enable optimization of process for aerospace components.