Abstract

The volume of weld bead deposit on a welded joint, has a lot to say about the integrity of the weldment during its service life. Residual stresses, cracks etc can be greatly initiated with large weld bead. In this study, central composite design matrix was employed using Design Expert 7.01 software. A total of 20 sets of experiments were produced, the weld specimen was mild steel plate measuring 60mm x 40mm x 10mm. TIG welding machine with 100% Argon Shielding Gas was used for this experiment and at the end of the experiment, an optimum weld bead volume of 1105.75mm3/s was obtained with a coefficient of determination (R2) value of 0.9744 using response surface methodology (RSM) as the predictive modeling tool. This quantity of bead volume is expected to contain the adequate molten metal that is required to make the desired bead penetration at a minimum cost with appropriate weld quality and productivity.

Keywords

Butt welded joints, bead volume, mild steel, shielding gas, quadratic model, heat transfer, stainless steel