Experimental and Numerical Stress State Assesment in Refill Friction Stir Spot Welding Joints

Refill Friction Stir Spot Welding (RFSSW) is a technology used for joining solid materials that was developed in Germany in 2002 by GKSS-GmbH as a variant of the conventional friction stir spot welding (FSSW) [1]. In the RFSSW technology, the welding tool consists of a fixed outer part and rotating inner parts, which are called a pin and a sleeve. The tool for RFSSW is designed to plasticize the material of the parts to be joined by means of a rotary movement. The design of the tool allows independent vertical movement of both elements of the welding tool. This allows obtaining spot welds without creating holes that could weaken the structure. The main advantage of RFSSW is the potential for replacing the technologies that add weight to the structure or create discontinuities, such as joining with screws or rivets. Thus, RFSSW has great potential in the automotive, shipbuilding and aviation industries. Furthermore, the technology can be used to join different materials that could not be connected using other joining methods. The main objective of this work is to understand the physical and mechanical aspects of the RFSSW method – including the residual stress state inside the weld and around the joint. The results of the investigations can help to determine optimal parameters that could increase the strength and fatigue performance of the joint and to prove the significant advantage of RFSSW connections over other types of joints. The work assumes the correlation of two mutually complementary investigation methods: numerical analyses and experimental studies carried out with diffraction methods. The comparison between numerical and experimental results makes potentially possible the determination of degree of fatigue degradation of the material by observing the macroscopic stress state and the broadening of the diffraction peak width (FWHM), which is an indicator of the existence of micro-stress related to the dislocation density and grain size.