Mitigation of Friction Weld Failure Due to Oxides in Automobile Axle Housing

Present work involves failure analysis of the friction weld of commercial vehicle axle housing. Also, the work focusses on optimizing the process parameters to improve the quality of weld. Failure analysis involves visual inspection, microstructural analysis, fractography, SEM and EDX analysis. Failure analysis revealed oxides at the interface of friction welds. In order to avoid oxides, series of experiments were designed by varying the process parameters. Metallurgical analysis was carried out for all the designed experiments and the optimized set of parameters that mitigated formation of oxides was selected as the best process.