Magnetic pulse welding: machine optimisation for aluminium tubular joints production

Magnetic pulse welding (MPW) has recently been increasingly investigated for specific dissimilar material joining applications since this is a solid state clean process, with good energy efficiency that almost does not produce thermal degradation effects in the joint. This paper presents developments performed on a MPW machine to produce tubular joints in AA6063-T6 with lower energy than commercial machines. The welds were structural and mechanically characterised and fracture was always observed at ultimate tensile strengths above those of the base materials and outside the welded zone. An energy balance is also presented to verify the machine optimisation and the energy used compared to that reported for commercially available machines.