A study of the heat transfer mechanism in resistance spot welding of aluminum alloys AA5182 and AA6014

This work investigates heat transfer mechanism of aluminum resistance spot welding process. The main target is to determine thermal contact conductance and heat transfer coefficients for natural convection and thermal radiation at ambient air and forced convection inside the water-cooled electrodes. For this purpose, the heat transfer of hot sheets in a welding gun for aluminum alloys AA5182 and AA6014 is analyzed experimentally and numerically. The transient temperature field is measured by several thermocouples in a simplified experimental setup. Subsequent thermal-mechanical coupled finite element simulations of the experiments were used to calibrate the heat transfer coefficients. The heat transfer coefficient for natural convection and thermal radiation to ambient air is 13 \(\mathrm {\frac {W}{m^{2} K}}\) and the heat transfer coefficient for forced convection of electrode water-cooling is 25,000 \(\mathrm {\frac {W}{m^{2} K}}\). The results indicate that the thermal contact conductance can be assumed ideal for welding process. Additionally, the finite element model is validated by the measured and calculated dissipated heat due to forced convection. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed to compare the influence of maximum and minimum heat transfer coefficients of forced convection (water-cooling) on transient temperature field and dissipated heat of sample AA5182.