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A fully coupled thermo-mechanical model of friction stir welding

Article  in  The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology · May 2008

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Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293
DOI 10.1007/s00170-007-0971-6
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
A fully coupled thermo-mechanical model of friction
stir welding
Z. Zhang & H. W. Zhang
Received: 15 August 2006 / Accepted: 2 February 2007 / Published online: 1 March 2007
# Springer-Verlag London Limited 2007
Abstract This paper presents a new developed fully
coupled thermo-mechanical model of the friction stir
welding process. Results indicate that the rotation of the
shoulder can accelerate the material flow behavior near the
top surface. The material deformation and the temperature
field can have relations with the microstructural evolution.
The texture of the appearance of the friction stir welds can
correlate well with the equivalent plastic strain distributions
on the top surface. The temperature field in the friction stir
welding process is approximately symmetric to the welding
line. The material flows in different thicknesses are
different. The shoulder can have a significant effect on
material behaviors on the top surface, but this effect is
greatly weakened when the material gets closer to the
bottom surface of the welding plate.
Keywords Friction stir welding . Finite element method .
Fully coupled thermo-mechanical model .
Equivalent plastic strain
1 Introduction
Friction stir welding (FSW) is a relative new solid state
joining technology, which was invented by TWI in 1991.
This joining technique is energy efficient, environmentally
friendly, and versatile [1]. Since its invention, FSW has
been successfully applied to aerospace, ship and automobile
Z. Zhang (*) : H. W. Zhang
State Key Laboratory of Structural Analysis for Industrial
Equipment, Department of Engineering Mechanics,
Dalian University of Technology,
Dalian 116024, China
e-mail: zhangz@student.dlut.edu.cn
industries. The principle diagram of friction stir welding is
shown in Fig. 1. In friction stir welding, a rotating tool is
inserted into the butt of the welding plates. With the
rotation of the welding tool, the material near the tool-plate
interface becomes thermo-plastic. Then a tight joint can be
formed due to the continuous longitudinal movement and
the rotation of the welding tool.
Jones et al. [2] investigated the relation between the
microstructure and the microhardness in friction stir welded
2024 aluminum alloy. It was found that the inner minimum
hardness in the heat affected zone (HAZ) is the result of the
over-aged S phase and the outer minimum hardness is
the result of precipitate dissolution. Sato et al. [3] studied
the effect of the oxide layer on the bend properties of the
friction stir welded 1050. Fonda et al. [4] used the stop-
action technique to freeze in the dynamic deformation field
around the FSW tool. Attallah et al. [5] found that the
variations of the rotational speed and the feed rate can
affect the extent of the abnormal grain growth in friction
stir welds. Reynolds et al. [6] friction stir welded the 304L
stainless steel and found that the resulting welds over-
matched the relative base metal. Liu et al. [7] investigated
the tensile properties and fracture locations of friction stir
welded joints of 6061-T6 aluminum alloy. Boz et al. [8]
studied the effect of the stirrer geometry on bonding and
mechanical properties in friction stir welding process. Su et
al. [9] investigated the grain structure, dislocation density
and second phase particles in the various regions of the
friction stir weld and compared them with the base metal.
The material flow patterns during the friction stir welding
process were observed by Guerra et al. [10], who
demonstrated that the material flows on the retreating side
and the advancing side are different. The research of
Muthukumaran et al. [11] showed that the material flow
during the FSW process has two modes. The first mode of
280
Fig. 1 Principle diagram of
friction stir welding
metal transfer is caused by the rotation of the shoulder and
the other one by the extrusion around the pin. Liu et al. [12]
investigated the wear characteristics of WC-Co welding
tool in friction stir welding of aluminum matrix composite.
Chen et al. [13] carried out experiments using a high-speed
rotating tool traversing on two butted 6061 aluminum alloy
plates with three equally spaced gaps made of two notches
aligned along the butting joint of the parts. Fratini et al. [14]
reported the through-thickness residual stresses in alumi-
num FSW joints. Cavaliere et al. [15] investigated the
mechanical and microstructural properties of dissimilar
2024 and 7075 aluminium sheets joined by friction stir
welding.
Besides, numerical modeling is believed to be an
important method to investigate the mechanism of FSW.
Xu and Deng [16–19] used the finite element method based
on the solid mechanics to simulate the friction stir welding
process. Crawford et al. [20] examined the forces and
torques during friction stir welding with respect to
mechanistic defect development owing to process parame-
ter variation and a commercial software—FLUENT is used
for the simulation of FSW. Buffa et al. [21] proposed a
continuum based FEM model to simulate the friction stir
welding process and found that the effective strain dis-
tribution is non-symmetric about the welding line. Mandal
et al. [22] provided a theoretical framework for developing
a thermo-mechanical hot channel approach for augmenting
the FSW process. Khandkar et al. [23] presented a
sequentially coupled thermo-mechanical finite element
model to predict the residual stresses in friction stir welds
caused by thermal cycling in the FSW process. Zhang et al.
[24–28] used the semi-coupled thermo-mechanical model
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293
to analyze the material flows and mechanical features in the
FSW process, which constitute the basis of the current
research. Song et al. [29] used a thermal model to predict
the temperature distributions in FSW.
Although many numerical methods have been developed
to simulate the FSW process, the fully coupled thermo-
mechanical model of FSW based on solid mechanics
remains interesting and attractive. Schmidt et al. [30]
presented a fully coupled model of friction stir welding.
But in the model developed by Schmidt, the material
deformation near the top surface is zero. This means that
the translational movement and the rotation of the welding
tool do not cause the materials deformations near the top
surface. In fact, it is obvious that the rotation of the tool
shoulder can cause the material deformations near the top
surface of the friction stir weld [11, 16, 25–28]. So the
material deformations in the wake are not correctly
predicted in Schmidt’s model. Based on this fact, a new
fully coupled thermo-mechanical model of FSW is devel-
oped in the current research to correctly predict the material
deformations and the temperature field in the FSW process.
2 Constitutive equations and integration algorithm
The material used as the welding plate is AL 6061-T6. The
material properties are functions of temperature, as shown
in Ref. [24]. The flow rule of the material in high
temperature state can be expressed as

3s 0
Dp ¼ l ð1Þ
2s
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293 281

P


D represents
where  the inelastic rate of deformation, where Δɛ is defined by central difference operator
" #

Dp
¼ Dp : Dp 1=2 , which is the same meaning with

p
@Δx
the strain rate " . l means the scalar measuring of the rate of Δ" ¼ sym   ð7Þ
inelastic s denotes the equivalent stress, @ xt þ 12 Δx
 3 0 flow.
0 1=2
s ¼ 2s :s .
During the solution, the elasticity relationship and the
To account for the rotation of the material, an objective
integrated rate decomposition are satisfied exactly, so that
rate of the stress tensor is introduced [31]. The Jaumann
rate of the Kirchhoff stress tensor is given as following cs ¼ Del : c" ð8Þ
rJ
T
s ¼sW
s s
W ð2Þ where cs is the correction to the stress, c" is the correction
to the plastic strain increments and Del ¼ @"@el @" U
2
el is the
where the additive decomposition of the rate of deformation
tangent elasticity matrix.
tensor D into elastic and plastic components is implied, i.e.,
If hardening laws are considered, then
D ¼ De þ Dp . C is the forth-order constant elastic stiffness 
tensor for isotropic elastic response, C ¼ 2mI0 þ KI  I, @ha @ha
ca ¼ ha cl þ Δl : cs þ cb ð9Þ
where K and μ are the Lame constants, I is the fourth-order @s @Hb
identity tensor, I0 ¼ I  13 I  I, and the symbol ⊗ denotes
where ca is the correction to ΔHa , and cl is the correction
the tensor product. W is the rate of spin tensor.
to Δλ.
The rate of deformation is defined as the symmetric part
The flow rule is not satisfied exactly until the solution
of the velocity gradient,
has been found
1 
@g
 2
@ g @2g

D¼ ðrvÞT þ rv ð3Þ c"  cl  Δl : cs þ ca
2 @s @s@s @s@Ha
The rate of spin tensor is the skew symmetric part, @g
¼ Δl  Δ"pl ð10Þ
1  @s
W¼ ðrvÞT  rv ð4Þ
2 The Newton–Raphson iteration method is applied until the
Coulomb law is used in the tool-plates interface to compute flow equation and yield constraints are satisfied.
the shear stresses on the contact surfaces,
t int ¼ mPc ð5Þ 3 Geometry sketch and boundary conditions
where μ is the friction coefficient. μ=0.3 is used in the
current research. Pc is the contact pressure computed. The radius of the pin is 3 mm and the one of the shoulder is
The simplest operator that provides unconditional sta- 9 mm, as shown in Fig. 2. The inside angle of the rotating
bility for integration equations is the backward Euler tool is 80.5377°. This angle is believed to be very important
method. The strain rate decomposition is integrated over a for the formation of the tight joint of the friction stir weld.
time increment as The rotating tool is considered as rigid body in the current
numerical simulation. The rotating tool is meshed into 1877
Δ" ¼ Δ"el þ Δ"pl ð6Þ 4-node 3D bilinear rigid quadrilateral elements which

Fig. 2 Geometry of the rotating

tool
282
consist of 1879 nodes. The welding tool is rotated with an
angular velocity of 390 r/min around its axis. The welding
pin is considered as a cylinder without thread for
convenience of comparisons with experiments and to avoid
the computational difficulties in the pin-plate interface
when numerical model based on solid mechanics is used
in the current research.
A round plate is considered as the welding plate for
convenience of mesh. The translational velocity of
2.363 mm/s is applied on the part of the inflow region to
be identical to the opposite movement of the rotating tool in
a real manufacture, as shown in Fig. 3. The outer surface of
the welding plate is considered as Eulerian type, which can
help avoid the mesh entanglements and distortions caused by
the inflow and the outflow of materials in the boundary of
the welding plate. In the inner of the welding plate, arbitrary
Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) mesh is used. In the current
research, the radial direction of the ALE mesh is taken as
Lagrangian type and the circumferential direction Eulerian
type. The major feature of ALE methods is the appearance of
convection terms in the momentum and continuity equations.
The element coordinates no longer serve as surrogate
material coordinates. The procedures for updating the stress
and mesh should be carefully designed, as described in Ref.
[31]. The bottom surface is fixed in the direction of thickness
and is treated as sliding surface. The whole welding plate is
meshed into 10500 eight-node thermally coupled brick
Fig. 3 Sketch and boundary
conditions of welding plate
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293
elements which consist of 12,480 nodes. Trilinear displace-
ment and temperature are considered as freedom degrees.
Reduced integration is used for the computational efficiency.
Relax stiffness method is used for hourglass control caused
by the one point integration method.
The rotating tool is inserted into the welding plates with
an axial load of 70 MPa and then rotated around its axis
without translation for 5 seconds. This phase is very
important for the formation of the hydrostatic pressure in
the tool-plate interface and for the precise prediction of
material behaviors in the stage of the welding tool
translation. After 5 seconds self-rotation, the translational
velocity can be applied to the part of the Eulerian region of
the boundary of the welding plate. The stage of welding
tool’s translation lasts for 12 seconds.
4 Computational cost
A general finite element package, ABAQUS [32], is used
for the thermo-mechanical coupled simulation of friction
stir welding process in the current research. The explicit
procedure is integrated over small time increments. The
computer time involved in running a simulation using
explicit time integration with a given mesh is proportional
to the time period of the event. The time increment based
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293 283

Fig. 4 Equivalent plastic strain

in the longitudinal section of
friction stir weld

on the element-by-element stability estimate can be If a conservative expression is used, equations (11) and
rewritten as following: (12) can be combined together, as follows
 rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
r
Δt  min Le ð11Þ sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
K þ 2m T K þ 2m
n¼ ð13Þ
where the minimum is taken over all elements in the mesh. Le r
Le is the characteristic length associated with the elements.
ρ is the density of the material in the element. From this expression, it can be seen that the iteration
The time increment is the key factor for the computa- numbers can be controlled by mass scaling. The use of
tional cost, mass scaling by a factor of f is equivalent to the increase of
pffiffiffi
the loading speeds by a factor of f . Increasing the loading
T speeds has been believed to be an efficient method to
n¼ ð12Þ simulate the material responses in friction stir welding
Δt
when rate-independent constitutive model is used [24–28].
where T is the natural time of the event. In the current research, a mass scaling factor of 107 is used.

Fig. 5 Equivalent plastic strain

and mircostructure on the cross
section of friction stir weld
284 Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293

Fig. 6 Texture and equivalent

plastic strain on the top surface

Fig. 7 Temperature distribution

on friction stir weld
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293
5 Results and discussions
As discussed by Xu et al. [16], Muthukumaran et al. [11]
and Zhang et al. [25–28], the rotation of the shoulder can
accelerate the material flow near the top surface. So the
material deformation on the top surface in the wake is
higher than the one near the bottom surface. The equivalent
plastic strain in the longitudinal section of friction stir weld
is shown in Fig. 4. In the current instant, a 28.356 mm
length weld is shown. It can be seen that in the current
thermo-coupled model of FSW, the material deformation
becomes severer near the top surface by the rotation of the
shoulder, especially the border of the shoulder. It is noted
that the pin is slightly longer than the thickness of the
welding plate, which is different from the one in the real
Fig. 8 Temperature distribution
on the cross section of friction
stir weld
285
manufacture. This is because the mesh can be hardly
controlled if a shorter pin is used in numerical simulations
which can cause convergence problems.
Figure 5(a) shows the equivalent plastic strain in the
cross section of friction stir weld. The material deformation
on the advancing side is higher than the one on the
retreating side. The material deformation is the key factor
for the formation of the stirring zone in the friction stir
weld. The shape of the stirring zone is shown in Fig. 5(b). It
can be seen that the width of the stirring zone near the top
surface is larger than the one near the bottom surface.
Meanwhile, the material deformation near the top surface is
higher than the one near the bottom surface. So it can be
concluded that the material deformation can have a relation
with the microstructural evolution.
286 Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293

Fig. 9 Material flow on the top surface at advancing side (front view and top view)
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293 287

Fig. 10 Material flow on the top surface at retreating side

288 Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293

The rings’ texture can be formed in the appearance of the
friction stir welds, as shown in Fig. 6(a). The texture of the
appearance of the friction stir welds can correlate well with
the equivalent plastic strain distributions on the top surface,
as shown in Fig. 6. The maximum equivalent plastic strain
occurs near the border of the shoulder and the deformation
of the material on the advancing side is higher than the one
on the retreating side. The spacing between the rings is
equal to the displacement of the rotating tool in one
rotation. The shape of the equivalent plastic strain near the

Fig. 11 Material flow in the middle of the welding plate at advancing side
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293 289

Fig. 12 Material flow in the middle of the welding plate at retreating side
290 Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293

welding line is very similar to the one of the microstructural Figure 7 shows the temperature distribution of the
texture of the friction stir weld near the top surface. This friction stir weld at t=17 s. The maximum temperature on
means that the formation of the texture of the friction stir the welding plate occurs near the border of the shoulder.
welds is dominated by the material deformations. The temperature field is nearly symmetric to the welding

Fig. 13 Material flow on the bottom surface at advancing side

Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293 291

Fig. 14 Material flow on the bottom surface at retreating side

292
line. The temperature gradient on the leading side is higher
than the one on the trailing side. This kind of temperature
distribution has been reported by Song et al. [29].
Figure 8 shows the temperature distribution on the cross
section of friction stir weld in different instants. Before the
translation of the welding tool, i.e., in the stage of self
rotation, the temperature distribution is shown in Fig. 8(a). It
can be seen that the temperature is increased to 340°C at the
end of the self-rotation stage. When the rotating tool is
moving, the maximum temperature can be quickly increased
to be above 400°C. But at t=13.4 s, the temperature field is
very similar to the one at t=17 s. This means that the
maximum temperature occurring in the FSW process is not
continuously increased with time. When a maximum
temperature is achieved, e.g., about 410°C in the current
case, the maximum temperature is not apparently affected by
the translational movement of the rotating tool. Larger values
of temperature can be found near the top surface which is
contacted with the shoulder. This means that the rotation of
the tool shoulder can have an important contribution to the
formation of the temperature field in FSW.
The temperature field is approximately symmetric to the
welding line except for the region under the shoulder. The
shape of the temperature contour can correlate well with
the boundaries of the stirring zone in Fig. 5(b). Combing with
the above discussions on material deformations in Fig. 5, it
can be seen that a relation between the material deformation
and the temperature generated exists. In friction stir welding
process, the material near tool-plate interface is heated due to
the rotation and translation of the welding tool. So the
material in this region becomes softer and becomes easier to
be stirred. The rotation of the shoulder on the top surface
causes the temperature near the shoulder-plate interface to be
higher than the one near the bottom surface. So the material
near the top surface becomes softer and easier to be stirred.
This is the real reason for the higher deformation of material
near the top surface.
Figures 9 and 10 show the material flow patterns on the
top surface of the friction stir weld. It can be seen that the
material particles at advancing side enter into the retreating
side and then slough off from the welding tool at retreating
side. But the material particles at the retreating side do not
rotate with the welding tool and are directly pushed by the
welding tool to the wake. It is noted that the material
particles on the top surface do not enter into the region
under the shoulder. This means that the material on the top
surface can be pushed aside by the border of the shoulder.
This is the reason that the maximum equivalent plastic
strain occurs near the border of the shoulder.
The material flows in the middle of the welding plate are
shown in Figs. 11 and 12. It can be seen that the effect of
the border of the shoulder on material behaviors is
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293
weakened. The material particles can enter into the front
region under the shoulder. The material at the advancing
side can rotate with the welding pin instead of the shoulder.
After several revolutions, the material particles at advanc-
ing side start to be far away from the welding pin with
rotation and then slough off in the wake. The material
particles at retreating side are directly pushed to the wake
by the welding pin.
The material flows on the bottom surface of the welding
plate are shown in Figs. 13 and 14. Figures 13 and 14
reveal the same material flows in Ref. [24]. In Ref. [24], the
shoulder of the welding tool is not considered. This means
that the effect of the shoulder on material behaviors can be
neglected in the bottom surface of the welding plate.
From the above discussions, it can seen that the material
at the retreating side never rotates around the welding tool
and does not enter into the advancing side, which was
observed in experiments [10] in which a cylindrical pin
without a thread is used. The consistency between the
numerical results and the experimental observations can
validate the presented numerical model. But more details on
material flows can be revealed in the current numerical
modeling.
6 Conclusions
A fully coupled thermo-mechanical model of friction stir
welding is established in the current research. The main
obtained results are summarized as follows:
1) The rotation of the shoulder can accelerate the material
flow near the top surface.
2) The material deformation can have a relation with the
microstructural evolution.
3) The texture of the appearance of the friction stir welds
can correlate well with the equivalent plastic strain
distributions on the top surface.
4) The spacing between the rings is equal to the
displacement of the rotating tool in one rotation.
5) The rotation of the tool shoulder can have an important
contribution to the formation of the temperature field in
FSW.
6) The temperature field is approximately symmetric to
the welding line except for the region under the
shoulder.
7) The temperature gradient on the leading side is higher
than the one on the trailing side.
8) The shoulder can have a significant effect on material
behaviors on top surface, but this effect is greatly
weakened when the material gets closer to the bottom
surface of the welding plate.
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2008) 37:279–293
Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National
Natural Science Foundation (Nos. 10302007, 10421202 and
10225212), the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative
Research Team in University of China (PCSIRT) and the National
Key Basic Research Special Foundation of China (2005CB321704).
The authors would like to thank Prof. X. M. Deng and Dr. S. W. Xu at
the University of South Carolina for their invaluable suggestions and
discussions on the current research.
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