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The discussions relative to cold stamping are applicable to any forming operation occurring at room temperature such as roll forming, hydroforming, or conventional stamping. Similarly, hot stamping refers to any set of operations using Press Hardening Steels (or Press Quenched Steels), including those that are roll formed or fluid formed.
Automakers contemplating whether a part is cold stamped or hot formed must consider numerous factors. This blog covers some important considerations related to welding these materials for automotive applications. Most important is the discussion on Resistance Spot Welding (RSW) as it is the dominating process in automotive manufacturing.
Setting Correct Welding Parameters for Resistance Spot Welding
Specific welding parameters need to be developed for each combination of material type and thickness. In general, the Hot Press (HP) steels require more demanding process conditions. One important factor is electrode force which should be higher for the HP steel than for cold press type steel of the same thickness. The actual recommended force will depend on the strength level, and the thickness of the steel. Of course, this will affect the welding machine/welding gun force capability requirement.
Another important variable is the welding current level and even more important is the current range at which acceptable welds can be made. The current range is weldability measurement, and the best indicator of the welding process robustness in the manufacturing environment and sometime called proceed window. Note the relative range of current for different steel types. A smaller process window may require more frequent weld quality evaluation such as for weld size.
Relative Current Range (process windows) for Different Steel Types
The Effect of Coating Type on Weldability
In all cases of resistance spot welding coated steels, it is imperative to move the coating away from the weld area during and in the beginning of the weld cycle to allow a steel-to-steel weld to occur. The combination of welding current, weld time and electrode force are responsible for this coating displacement.
For all the coated steels, the ability of the coating to flow is a function of the coating type and properties, such as electrical resistivity and melting point, as well as the coating thickness.
An example of cross sectioned spot welds made on Hot Press Steel with Aluminum -Silicon coating is shown below. It shows two coating thicknesses and the displaced coating at the periphery of weld. This figure also shows the difference in current range for the different coating thickness. The thicker coating shows a smaller current range. In addition, the Al-Si coating has a much higher melting point than the zinc coatings on the cold stamped steels, making it more difficult to displace from the weld area.
Hot Press Steel with Aluminum -Silicon
Liquid Metal Embrittlement and Resistance Spot Welding
Cold-formable, coated, Advance High Strength Steels such as the 3rd Generation Advanced High Strength Steels are being widely used in automotive applications. One welding issue these materials encounter is the increased hardness in the weld area, that sometime results in brittle fracture of the weld.
Another issue is their sensitivity to Liquid Metal Embrittlement (LME) cracking. These two issues are discussed in detail on the WorldAutoSteel AHSS Guidelines website and our recently released Phase 2 Report on LME.
Resistance Spot Welding Using Current Pulsation
The most effective solution for the issues described above is using current pulsation during the welding cycle. A schematic description is shown below.
The pulsation allows much better control of the heat generation and the weld nugget development. The pulsation variables include the number of pulses (typically 2-4), the current level and time for each pulse, and the cool time between the pulses.
In summery, pulsation (and sometime current upslope) in Resistance Spot Welding proved to be beneficial for the following applications:
- Coated Cold Stamped steels
- Cold stamped Advance High Strength Steels
- Multi materials stack-ups – As described in our articles here on 3T/4T and 5T Stack-Ups
Thanks is given to Menachem Kimchi, Associate Professor-Practice, Dept of Materials Science, Ohio State University and Technical Editor – Joining, AHSS Application Guidelines, for this article.
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This blog is a short summary of a published comprehensive research work titled: “Peculiar Roles of Nickel Diffusion in Intermetallic Compound Formation at the Dissimilar Metal Interface of Magnesium to Steel Spot Welds” Authored by Luke Walker, Carolin Fink, Colleen Hilla, Ying Lu, and Wei Zhang; Department of Materials Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University
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There is an increased need to join magnesium alloys to high-strength steels to create multi-material lightweight body structures for fuel-efficient vehicles. Lightweight vehicle structures are essential for not only improving the fuel economy of internal combustion engine automobiles but also increasing the driving range of electric vehicles by offsetting the weight of power systems like batteries.
To create these structures, lightweight metals, such as magnesium (Mg) alloys, have been incorporated into vehicle designs where they are joined to high strength steels. It is desirable to produce a metallurgical bond between Mg alloys and steels using welding. However, many dissimilar metal joints form intermetallic compounds (IMCs) that are detrimental to joint ductility and strength. Ultrasonic interlayered resistance spot welding (Ulti-RSW) is a newly developed process that has been used to create strong dissimilar joints between aluminum alloys and high-strength steels. It is a two-step process where the light metal (e.g., Al or Mg alloy) is first welded to an interlayer (or insert) material by ultrasonic spot welding (USW). Ultrasonic vibration removes surface oxides and other contaminates, producing metal-to-metal contact and, consequently, a metallurgical bond between the dissimilar metals. In the second step, the insert side of the light metal is welded to steel by the standard resistance spot welding (RSW) process.
Cross-section View Schematics of Ulti-RSW Process Development
For resistance spot welding of interlayered Mg to steel, the initial schedule attempted was a simple single pulse weld schedule that was based on what was used in our previous study for Ulti-RSW of aluminum alloy to steel . However, this single pulse weld schedule was unable to create a weld between the steel sheet and the insert when joining to Mg. Two alternative schedules were then attempted; both were aimed at increasing the heat generation at the steel-insert interface. The first alternative schedule utilized two current pulses with Pulse 1, high current displacing surface coating and oxides and Pulse 2 growing the nugget. The other pulsation schedule had two equal current pulses in terms of current and welding time.
Lap shear tensile testing was used to evaluate the joint strength using the stack-up schematically, shown below. Note the images of Mg and steel sides of a weld produced by Ulti-RSW.
Lap Shear Tensile Test Geometry and the Resultant Weld Nuggets
An example of a welded sample showed a distinct feature of the weld that is comprised of two nuggets separated by the insert: the steel nugget formed from the melting of steel and insert and the Mg nugget brazed onto the unmelted insert. This feature is the same as that of the Al-steel weld produced by Ulti-RSW in our previous work. Although the steel nugget has a smaller diameter than the Mg nugget, it is stronger than the latter, so the failure occurred on the Mg sheet side.
Joint strength depends on several factors, including base metal strength, sheet thickness, and nugget size, making it difficult to compare how strong a weld truly is from one process to another. To better compare the dissimilar joints created by different processes, joint efficiency, a “normalized” quantity was calculated for various processes used for dissimilar joining of Mg alloys to steels in the literature, and those results, along with the efficiencies of Ulti-RSW with inserts, are shown together below. Most of the literature studies also used AZ31 as the magnesium base metal. The ones with high joint efficiency (about 53%) in the literature are resistance element welding (REW) and friction stir spot welding (FSSW). In our study, Ulti-RSW with SS316 insert was able to reach an excellent joint efficiency of 71.3%, almost 20% higher than other processes.
Process Evaluation and Comparison
Thanks are given to Menachem Kimchi, Associate Professor-Practice, Dept of Materials Science, Ohio State University, and Technical Editor – Joining, AHSS Application Guidelines, for this article.
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Urbanization and waning interest in vehicle ownership point to new transport opportunities in megacities around the world. Mobility as a Service (MaaS) – characterized by autonomous, ride-sharing-friendly EVs – can be the comfortable, economical, sustainable transport solution of choice thanks to the benefits that today’s steel offers.
The WorldAutoSteel organization is working on the Steel E-Motive program, which delivers autonomous ride-sharing vehicle concepts enabled by Advanced High-Strength Steel (AHSS) products and technologies.
The Body structure design for this vehicle is shown in Figure 1. It also indicates the specific joint configuration of 5 layers AHSS sheet stack-up as shown in Table 1. Resistance spot welding parameters were developed to allow this joint to be made by a single weld. (The previous solution for this welded joint is to create one spot weld with the bottom 3 sheets indicated in the table and a second weld to join the top 2 sheets, combining the two-layer groups to 5T stack-up.)
NOTE: Click this link to read a previous AHSS Insights blog that summarizes development work and recommendations for resistance spot welding 3T and 4T AHSS stack-ups: https://bit.ly/42Alib8
Table 1. Provided materials organized in stack-up formation showing part number, name, grade, gauge in mm, and coating type. Total thickness = 6.8 mm
The same approach of utilizing multiple current pulses with short cool time in between the pulses was shown to be most effective in this case of 5T stack-up. It is important to note that in some cases, the application of a secondary force was shown to be beneficial, however, it was not used in this example.
To establish initial welding parameters simulations were conducted using the Simufact software by Hexagon. As shown in Figure 2, the final setup included a set of welding electrodes that clamped the 5-layer AHSS stack-up. Several simulations were created with a designated set of welding parameters of current, time, number of pulses, and electrode force.
Figure 2. Example of simulation and experimental results showing acceptable 5T resistance spot weld (Meets AWS Automotive specifications)
Thanks is given to Menachem Kimchi, Associate Professor-Practice, Dept of Materials Science, Ohio State University and Technical Editor – Joining, AHSS Application Guidelines, for this article.
RSW Modelling and Performance
The advantages of numerical simulations for resistance welding are obvious for saving time and reducing costs in product developments and process optimizations. Today’s modeling techniques can predict temperature, microstructure, stress, and hardness distribution in the weld and Heat Affected Zone (HAZ) after welding. Commercial modeling software is available which considers material type, various current modes, machine characteristics, electrode geometry, etc. An example of process simulation results for spot welding of 0.8-mm DC 06 low-carbon steel to 1.2-mm DP 600 steel is shown in Figure 1. Obviously, this technique can apply to dissimilar thicknesses, material types, and geometries. Application of adhesives is also being used with these simulations. This simulation techniques are found to be very beneficial to predict vehicle crashworthiness as it can dramatically reduce the cost of crash evaluations.
You will find several articles in this section describing RSW modelling studies and procedures.
Figure 1: Simulation results with microstructures and hardness distribution for spot welding of 0.8-mm DC06 low-carbon steel to 1.2-mm DP 600 steel.Z-1
Manufacturing Issues
Spot Welding of Three Steel Sheets with Large Thickness Ratios
Car parts such as side panels are fabricated by spot welding three steel sheets together. When the outer steel sheet is a thin sheet of mild steel and the reinforcement steel sheets are thick sheets of HSS (that is, when there is a large thickness ratio between the sheets), it is often difficult to spot weld such sheets together. The term “thickness ratio” as used herein refers to the total thickness of the three steel sheets divided by the thickness of the thinnest steel sheet. Nuggets obtained by spot welding of three steel sheets are illustrated in Figure 1 (a). In the spot welding of three steel sheets with a large thickness ratio, it is difficult to form a nugget at the interface between thin and thick steel sheets, as shown in Figure 1 (b). The reason for this is that in spot welding, because of heat removal by the water-cooled electrode, the fusion progresses from the thickness center of the three steel sheets toward the outside, except for the heat generated by contact resistance at the steel sheet surfaces in the early stages of welding time. In addition, in view of the dimensional accuracy of actual members, it is necessary to set appropriate welding conditions when there is a gap between steel sheets. In practice, the proper welding current range is as shown in Figure 2. However, the welding current range is often narrower in one-step spot welding.
Figure 1: Three sheets spot welded.N-5
Figure 2: Weldability lobe of three sheets spot welded.
As a means of solving the above problem when there is no gap between the steel sheets, a method has been proposed in which the diameter of the electrode tip at the thin-sheet side is reduced and the welding force and current are varied during the welding time. In addition, a two- step pulsating current welding method (Figure 3) has been proposed in which neither the electrode diameter nor the welding force are changed. This method is described briefly below. Initially, during the first welding step, a relatively large welding current is passed to generate heat by using the contact resistance at the interface between the thin and thick steel sheets and that between the thick steel sheets. This method does not positively use the contact resistance that is effective when the electrode force is low. Since the method can be applied even under a high electrode force, it is particularly effective when there is a gap between the steel sheets to be welded together.
Figure 3: Welding current pattern.
An experiment was conducted by using the above technology. The materials used were a 0.6- mm-thick sheet of mild steel and two 1.6-mm-thick sheets of HSS (980 MPa class). Spacers 1.4-mm thick were inserted at intervals of 40 mm between the thin and thick steel sheets and between the thick steel sheets. A servomotor-driven, single-phase AC welder was used for the test. The electrode used was a Cr-Cu dome radius type with a 40-mm tip upper radius and 6-mm tip lower diameter. The welding force was 3.43 kN. To evaluate the diameter of fusion at the interface between the thin and thick sheets, which determines the proper current range, a chisel test was conducted at the interface and evaluated the plug diameter.
The test results are illustrated in Figure 4. The horizontal axis represents the first step welding current for one-step welding (welding time t1 = 18 cycles) and the second-step welding current for two-step welding (first welding time t1 = 18 cycles, second welding time t2 = 8 cycles) or pulsation welding [t1 = 18 cycles, t2 = (5-cycle heat/2-cycle cool) × 5]. For one- or two-step welding, the welding current range was less than 1 kA. Conversely, with pulsation, it was possible to secure a proper welding range of 3 kA or more (about 1.8 kA when there was no gap between the steel sheets).
Figure 4: Current ranges for different welding current patterns.
In addition to the two-step pulsating current welding method (Figure 4 above), preheating the sheets at 20-25% of the normal current before beginning the impulses can be effective when joining three layers of extremely different thicknesses. Figure 5 shows a weld cross section using preheating prior to three impulses.
Figure 5: Cross section of three sheet spot weld including preheating prior to pulsations.C-6
Another solution to RSW three sheets is when the Fusion Zone (FZ) formation process is controlled by setting the welding current and welding force during welding in multiple steps; this is referred to as Intelligent Spot Welding. (ISW). Using this approach, nugget formation between a thin sheet and thick sheet becomes possible when reduced welding force is applied. In Step 1 of the welding process, a FZ is reliably formed between the thin sheet and thick sheet by applying conditions of low welding force, short welding time, and high current. In the subsequent Step 2, a FZ is formed between the two thick sheets by apply high welding force and a long welding time. The results are shown in Figure 6, in which welding is performed with the edge of three steel sheets positioned directly under the electrodes, and the behavior of FZ formation at the edge of the sheets was observed with a high-speed video camera. Condition (a) is welding under a constant welding force and condition (b) is ISW. In condition (a), a nugget was formed between the two thick sheets, but the nugget failed to grow to the thin sheet-thick sheet joint, and the two sheets were not welded. However, condition (b) shows that nuggets have formed between both the thin and thick sheet and between the two thick sheets. The optimal welding current range for Step 2 can be determined from nugget formation between the two thick sheets, resulting in a wide available current range equal to or greater than that in joint welding of two thick sheets.
Figure 6: Results of observation of FZ formation phenomenon in RSW of three-sheet joint by high-speed video camera.J-1
Application of Spot Welding to Hollow Members
In spot welding of car bodies, the so-called direct spot welding (in which the welding current is passed while two or more steel sheets are pressed against each other) by the welding electrodes is used most commonly. However, for those parts with closed cross sections, it may become necessary to drill a working hole through which the electrodes for direct spot welding of the steel sheets can be passed. In this case, the decline in rigidity of the drilled part being compensated for by using a thicker steel sheet or providing a reinforcing member will inevitably increase the weight of the car body. Therefore, attempts were made to reduce the steel sheet thickness (weight) and secure the required stiffness simultaneously without drilling any hole in the steel sheets. Indirect spot welding was used, in which the steel sheets are pressed and welded by a couple of electrodes from one side at the same time. Because the steel sheets are pressed by electrodes from one side, the weld sinks and the area of contact between the steel sheets increases (the current density decreases) if an excessive force is applied, making it difficult to perform fusion welding. Conversely, if an excessively large current is applied, the local current density between the electrodes increases because of a shunt current, causing a crack or explosion.
Studies were made for various welding conditions for the combination of a hollow member with a 1.6-mm wall thickness and a sheet-formed member with a 0.7-mm thickness. By using an electrode with a specially designed tip and a DC power supply in combination, indirect spot welding could be performed of the above members without requiring any special pattern of conduction or pressing, even in the presence of a gap between the members or the presence of shunts (existing welding points). An example of the cross section of an indirect spot weld is illustrated in Figure 1, which clearly indicates that a sufficiently large nugget was formed.
Figure 1: Cross section of indirect spot weld for hollow and sheet-like components.
For the indirect RSW with single-side access of the welding electrode, the variable controls of electrode force and current during welding were developed to promote the weld nugget formation. Experiments as well as numerical simulations were conducted to study the welding phenomena and optimize the welding process. It was verified that the nugget was stably formed with the developed process even when shunting was large. Figure 2 describes the effect of variable current and force on the promotion of weld nugget formation.
At the first stage with low welding current and high electrode force, the electric conduction with sufficient load at weld preheats the sheet, which promotes contacting area between the electrode and upper sheet and thus inhibits the expulsion from the surface. Meanwhile, contacting area between upper and lower sheets is also promoted forming the stable conduction path. Subsequently, at the second stage with high welding current and low electrode force, the nugget formation is effectively promoted with a heated region concentrated at the center in weld, avoiding the further penetration of welding electrode into the upper sheet and thus maintaining the current density.
Figure 2: Concept of nugget formation process of variable current and force control for single-sided RSW.J-1
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