Electrodes for contact electric welding of aluminium alloys

Aluminium and aluminium alloys have the high electrical and heat conductivity. It gives rise to difficulties for a choice of electrodes material for their contact electric welding. This paper describes the investigations performed to solve the above problem. The purpose of this investigation was to obtain dispersion-hardening alloys by the internal oxidation method, to optimize their contents and treatment modes, to produce electrodes of these alloys and to test them. The strengthing effect of alloys with oxide particles depends on their size stability at high temperatures. Despite of the fact, that oxides are the most stable of all the non-metallic phases their coagulation takes place. Based on the early results, we chose two types of alloys, first No. 1 Cu - 0,4%Al and second No. 2 Cu - 0,2%Be for production of electrodes. These alloys had not additional alloying elements. These alloys were prepared as 1 mm plates and flake-formed 200 m thick, and also No. 1 as a powder of size 100 mkm (received from Korea). The large samples for electrodes were produced by three methods : explosive welding method, dynamic one including the explosion compression of electrode blank and the quasi-dynamic method including the high-speed compression of dense briquest and the further hot extrusion of a rod.