• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.554-561
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• 1998

Vehicle body structures are formed by thousands of spot welds and fatigue failure of vehicle structures occur near the spot welds after driving a long way at a durability test road. It is necessary to know accurately the reason of the fatigue failure of the spot weld in the developing stage in order to reinforce it. Many investigations have been done regarding the strength of spot welded joints, contributing to understand its fatigue strength. In developing process, a fatigue failed spot welded area can be repaired by $CO_2$ welding or another method to continue the test. To know the effect of reinforcing these welds, several methods of welding were analyzed and compared to spot welding. With the results of this test, the appropriate repair method can be used instead of spot welding during the development of new car and best design guide can be given for the strength. In this study, fatigue and static tensile tests are made and microstructure is investigated for the purpose of estimating the strength of welded joints by using spot welded and $CO_2$ plug welded specimens. The tested specimens are of two types : Tensile-shear type(TS) and L-tension type(LT).

• Korean Journal of Metals and Materials
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• v.49 no.12
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• pp.967-976
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• 2011

Conventional fracture tests of resistance spot welds have been performed without consideration of the paint baking process in the automobile manufacturing line. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of the paint baking process on load carrying capacity and fracture mode for resistance spot welded 590 dual phase (DP), 780DP, 980DP, 590 transformation in duced plasticity (TRIP), 780TRIP and 1180 complex phase (CP) steels. With paint baking after resistance spot welding, the l-shape tensile test (LTT) and nano-indentation test were conducted on the as-welded and paint baked samples. Paint baking increased the load-carrying capacity of the resistance spot welded samples and improved the fracture appearance from partial interfacial fracture (PIF) to button fracture (BF). Improvement in fracture appearance after LTT is observed on weldments of 780 MPa grade TRIP steels, especially in the low welding current range with paint baking conditions. The higher carbon contents (or carbon equivalent) are attributed to the low weldability of the resistance spot welding of high strength steels. Improvement of the fracture mode and load carrying ability has been achieved with ferrite hardening and carbide formation during the paint baking process. The average nano-indentation hardness profile for each weld zone shows hardening of the base metal and softening of the heat affected zone (HAZ) and the weld metal, which proves that microstructural changes occur during low temperature heat treatment.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.42-47
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• 2003

Stainless rolling stocks are usually fabricated by spot welding process without painting. Indentation on the surface of the car body after spot welding injures the beauty of the stainless rolling stocks. In this study, insulated electrode tips to reduce the indentation are developed and applied to the actual spot welding works. The developed tips are composed of head, neck, hole for cooling water, body and resistance material. They provide large surface contact area with the base materials during spot welding and enhance the current density by necking. Experimental results using the developed tips show that small indentation and sufficient tensile shear strength is produced due to large contact area and enhanced current density.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.70-75
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• 2003

Spot welding is a process that sheet metals are joined in one or more spot by heating at the faying interface. In this process, the spatter is dispersed from melted area. It has been reported that spatter generation has adverse effects on weld quality. However, no systematic study has been carried out to find out its effect on weld quality in resistance spot welding processes. In this study, specially designed specimen are used to perform experimental investigation of spatter generation and its effect. Major finding of this study show trends in tensile-shear strength for various amounts of spatter generated during spot welding process. Thus, optimum welding conditions are proposed in view of spatter generation and tensile-shear strength. (Received December 11, 2002)

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2000.10a
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• pp.43-45
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• 2000

Resistance Spot Welding has been one of the important process in the sheet metal fabrication of auto-body industry It is well known that the nugget formation of RSW is the major factor for the strength of the body. A high speed camera was used to consider initial melting and growth of the weld nugget in order to find out the nugget formation mechanism. It was observed that such mechanism had an effect on the dynamic resistance, which was a process parameter of resistance spot welding. Also, the relationship between the mechanism and process parameter was considered for the industrial application.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.76-83
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to propose a method to decide near-optimal settings of the constant current fuzzy control parameters using a controlled random search. This method tries to find the near-optimal settings of the constant current fuzzy control parameters through experiments. It has an advantage of being able to carry out searches in the search domain which includes some irregular points. The method suggested in this study was used to determine the fuzzy control parameters by which the desired welding current were formed during inverter DC resistance spot welding. The output variable was the ITAE (integral of time multiplied by the absolute error). This output variable was determined according to the input variables, which are the GE, GDE, and GDU. This study described how to obtained near-optimal welding current condition over a wide search space conducting a relatively small number of experiments.

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 1999.05a
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• pp.233-236
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• 1999

The welding residual stress should be considered in fatigue stress analysis because it develope during the process of the electric resistance spot welding and it causes bad affect on the fatigue crack initiation and growth at nugget edge of spot welded points. Therefore the accurate estimation of residual stress is crucial. In this study, nonlinear finite element analysis on welding residual stress generated during the process of the spot welding was conducted, and their results were compared with the experimental data measured by X-ray diffraction method. From the results, it was found that welding residual stress existed as tension in the nugget center and as compression around the nugget edge.

• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.189-195
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• 2013

In this study, the weld strength of extru-rivet spot welding was investigated by simulation and experiment. In order to obtain hot plasticity flow bonding of the two plates by a single rivet, electrodes are used for heating of the two plates and the rivet by electric resistance. Because weld strength is influenced by the temperature in the weld zone, the diameter of the electrodes and the amount of current supplied to the electrodes are important variables. For the simulation, heat distribution and weld strength were calculated using DEFORM-3D. The weld strength in the weld zone was calculated for various values of the experimental parameters. The simulation results showed that the weld strength was the highest when the weld current was 37kA, the electrode diameter was 12mm, and the welding frequency was 90cycle. Aluminum 5052 was used for the experimental study. A total of three aluminum plates, two welding plates with 1mm thickness and one plate with 2mm thickness for the inserting rivet, were used for the experimental extru-rivet spot welding.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.44-48
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• 2009

In automotive company, a lot of researchers have investigated for the spatterless welding process during last two decades. A spatter influences on the product quality such as strength and surface states. In this paper, a hollow tip is proposed for spatterless process. An optimal size of electrode hole is obtained from a weldability evaluation of each hole diameter. Through the cross section analysis, a phenomenon that molten metal moves in the hole which located between two workpiece is observed, and this makes spatterless welding process even though current is higher. Finally, widely acceptable weld area in lobe curve is obtained by using hollow tip as compare with conventional no hollow tip. In this paper, spatterless resistance spot welding with improvement weldability and productivity is proposed by using hollow tip.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.393-406
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• 1993

In resistance spot welding process, size of molten nuggest have been utilized to assess the integrity of the weld quality. However real-time monitoring of the nugget size is an extremely difficult problem. This paper describes the design of an artificial neural networks(ANN) estimator to predict the nugget size for on-line use of weld quality monitoring. The main task of the ANN estimator is to realize the mapping characteristics from the sampled dynamic resistance signal to the actual negget size through training. The structure of the ANN estimator including the number of hidden layers and nodes in a layer is determined by an estimation error analysis. A series of welding experiments are performed to assess the performance of the ANN estimator. The results are quite promissing in that real-time estimation of the invisible nugget size can be achieved by analyzing the dynamic resistance signal without any conventional destructive testing of welds.