Electron Beam Welding
Electron Beam Welding
Electron Beam Welding
Electron beam welding (EBW) was employed in joining the thin-walled containers,
showing the feasibility of EBW to overcome the size limitation issue [68].
Related terms:
Tungsten, Electric Arc Welding, Gas Metal Arc Welding, Heat Affected Zone, Laser
Beam Welding, Resistance Welding
Physics of Welding
Ramesh Singh, in Applied Welding Engineering, 2012
(22)
Where:
The beam current, accelerating voltage and welding speed are the factors that
determine the depth of penetration of a focused beam.
The EBW process has several advantages due to its focused heat source for welding,
as listed below:
4. The relative low heat input results in low distortions in the base metal.
The welding process involves the application of high power density, which instantly
volatizes the metal. This creates a needle-like, vapor-filled cavity or keyhole in the
work-piece, which allows the beam to penetrate through the section of the metal
to be welded. The cavity is kept open by the pressure of the vapor. The flow of the
molten metal is from the front to rear of the keyhole, as the weld solidifies.
Three commercial variants of the EBW process are given Table 2-2-2.
Electron beam welding is often used for advanced materials and complex, critical
parts such as turbine rotors, but it can also be suitable and economic for many
simpler processes involving large production runs. It is very suitable for butt welding
materials of different thicknesses, but is particularly competitive for welding thick
materials of up to 250 mm. Electron beam welding has the following advantages:
• The high flexibility of this method permits everything from thin sheet to very
thick materials to be welded.
• Welding speed is much higher than (for example) arc welding. However, when
assessing overall productivity, allowance must be made for the time required
to evacuate the air from the vacuum chamber.
• The vacuum means that reactive materials such as titanium can be welded
without risk of oxidation.
• Welds are narrow, with a high penetration/depth ratio.
• Heat input is low in absolute terms, resulting in low residual stresses and little
distortion of the workpiece. Reproducibility and tolerances are also good, as
the method is mechanised.
• Many otherwise difficult materials and material combinations can be welded.
The electron gun (see Figure 12.6), is supplied from a high-voltage power source
(30–175 kV), but at a low current (less than 1 A). The electrons are accelerated from
the anode and are focused and deflected by magnetic coils in a manner similar to
that used in television and computer screens.
Figure 12.6. Electron beam welding.
The electron beam requires a vacuum, and so welding is carried out in a vacuum
chamber. This normally requires the chamber to be opened to load or change a
work-piece, after which the air must be evacuated by a high-vacuum pump. However,
various designs that use forms of air locks for the loading and unloading of materials
have been developed to deal with smaller items or (for example) strip materials.
When the electron beam meets the workpiece, it produces a secondary emission of
x-rays, and so the vacuum chamber also provides protection against this radiation.
Although the electron gun itself requires a high vacuum, the vacuum in the rest of
the chamber does not need to be quite so high. The electron beam can even travel a
short distance in air, but is quickly absorbed and scattered, so limiting penetration.
In addition, if the welding is performed outside the vacuum chamber, some other
method of protection against x-rays will be required.
Manufacturing methods
Mechanical Engineer's Reference Book (Twelfth Edition), 1994
16.3.1.13 Welding and cutting with power beams
Electron beam welding and laser welding utilize high-energy beams which are
focused onto a spot of about 0.2 mm diameter on the work piece surface. This
intense heat source, which releases its kinetic energy when the beam hits the surface,
is radically different from arc welding, in which the arc melts an area of about 5–20
mm in diameter, depending on the welding conditions.
When the power density of an electron or a laser beam at the focused spot is 10 kW
mm−2 or greater, energy is delivered at a faster rate than can be conducted away in
the form of heat in the work piece and the progressive vaporization of metal through
the section thickness forms a hole. If the beam is then traversed along the work
piece, molten metal flows around the sides of the hole and solidifies at the rear of
the hole. Molten metal at the sides of the hole is held in place by surface tension
and the presence of metal vapour in the hole in the same manner as that described
as the keyholding technique in Section 16.3.1.11.
As with plasma welding, a deep penetration weld with a high depth-to-width ratio is
formed with minimum distortion of the parent metal. Maximum penetration depths
in steel are approximately 280 mm for electron beam welding and 12 mm for laser
welding, although developments in the latter process are likely to increase this to 25
mm or more.
Electron beam welding In this process a finely focused beam of electrons passes from
a cathode and travels through a hole in an anode and is focused onto a spot on the
work piece 0.2-1 mm diameter by means of a magnetic lens. Deflection coils are used
to cause the beam to move in a circular pattern to increase the width of the weld, so
that fusing two mating surfaces together in a close square butt joint is possible. The
cathode in the electron gun is maintained at a negative potential of 60–150 kV and
the gun is contained in a vacuum of 5 × 10−5 torr. In the work chamber a pressure of
5 × 18−3 torr is suitable for welding most metals and for some applications a pressure
of 10−1 torr or less is used with the advantage of much shorter chamber excavation
times, resulting in increased production rates.
1. Maximum weld penetration and minimum weld width and shrinkage, en-
abling all thicknesses to be welded in a single pass.
2. The highest purity weld metal is produced because of the absence of any
contaminating gases such as oxygen or nitrogen.
3. A high vacuum allows a long distance to be maintained between the gun and
the work piece, which facilitates observation of the welding process.
4. The pump downtime is lengthy, up to an hour or more depending on the
size of the chamber, which would lower the production rate of small jobs with
shallow welds but would be insignificant when welds in plate 50 mm or thicker
are made with a single pass.
Medium-vacuum welding with small working chambers is used extensively for small
repetitive work such as welding of finish machined geartrains and similar high-vol-
ume mass-production applications for the motor industry. Many high-precision
semi-finished or fully machined components for aircraft engines are also welded by
the electron beam process.
Medium-vacuum electron beam welding is not suitable for welding reactive metals
and alloys such as titanium and zirconium, which require the high-vacuum process
to obtain sound welds.
Out-of-vacuum electron beam welding Provided that the gun-to-work distance is less
than about 35 mm to allow for the greater dispersion of the electron beam compared
with working in a vacuum, it is possible to weld many materials out of vacuum. With
60 kW non-vacuum equipment single-pass welds can be made in metal thicknesses
up to 25 mm. Metals welded out of vacuum include carbon and low-alloy steels,
and copper and aluminium alloys. Because of the presence of air, which can cause
contamination of the weld metal, it is usually necessary to provide an inert shielding
gas to cover the weld zone.
Laser welding and cutting Two types of lasers are used for welding and cutting: the
solid-state YAG (yttrium–aluminium–garnet) and the carbon dioxide (CO2) laser.
The term ‘laser’ is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of
Radiation and a laser is a device for producing monochromatic (single-wavelength)
light that is coherent (i.e. all the waves are in the same phase). A laser beam can
be transmitted over many metres and can be focused to produce the high-energy
density required for welding or cutting.
The solid-state YAG laser The solid-state laser is stimulated to emit coherent radiation
by means of the light from one or more powerful flash tubes and the output is in
the infrared region around 1.06 μm. Both input and output are generally pulsed and
the power output is a maximum of 500 W.
Pulsed laser welding is extensively used in the electronics industry where minia-
turization requires very precise positioning of small welds. Typical examples are
encapsulation of microelectronic packages and the joining of fire wires by butt,
lapped or cross-wire joints. Spot welds can be made between overlapping sheets and
seam welds formed by a series of overlapping spot welds. Most metal can be welded,
including steel, copper, nickel, aluminium, titanium, niobium, tantalum, and their
alloys. Solid-state lasers are also used for precision drilling of holes with very small
diameters.
The carbon dioxide laser In the carbon dioxide laser the lasing medium is a gaseous
mixture of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and helium at a reduced pressure of 2–50 torr.
The output of the carbon dioxide laser is in the mid-infrared (10.6 μm) and CO2
lasers are available with powers of up to 20 kW. The high power density produced
(104 W mm−2 or more) forms a cavity or keyhole in the work piece which enables a
deep penetration weld to be produced similar in appearance to an electron beam
weld.
Penetration is less than for an electron beam operating at the same power because
of plasma gas formed in the keyhole. The plasma gas escapes from the keyhole and
interacts with the laser beam, restricting penetration to approximately 12 mm in
mild steel. Methods have been developed for overcoming this problem41 by the use
of either a pulsed output from the laser with pulses of shorter time than that required
to generate the plasma or a high-velocity jet of helium to disrupt the plasma above
the weld. Such developments are likely to increase the thicknesses that can be laser
welded to 25 mm or more.
Carbon dioxide lasers are used in production in some automotive and aerospace
applications, particularly for titanium and nickel alloys. The advantage of laser
welding over elctron beam welding is that a vacuum is not required, which simplifies
the welding operation. Other materials that can be welded by the carbon dioxide
laser are steels, copper alloys, zirconium and refractory metals, but aluminium alloys
are not readily weldable with the CO2 laser because of their reflectivity of the laser
beam.
Laser cutting Cutting with the CO2 laser is carried out by a combination of melting
and vaporization with an auxiliary jet of gas to blow the molten metal from the cut.
Various gases are used for this purpose, including oxygen, compressed air, inert
gases and carbon dioxide.
Oxygen produces an exothermic reaction with ferrous metals which increases the
efficiency of cutting. The inert gases produce clean unoxidized surfaces - important
features when cutting readily oxidized metals such as aluminium and titanium.
Fig.8.8. A 2 m3 chamber, 100 kW, electron beam welding machine, showing the open
vacuum chamber. It is capable or welding up to 200 mm thick aluminium.
The process may be used for the welding of material as thin as foil and up to 400 mm
thick in a single pass. The keyhole penetration mode gives almost uniform shrinkage
about the neutral axis of the component, leading to low levels of distortion. This
enables finish machined components to be welded and maintained within tolerance.
The transverse shrinkage also results in the solidifying weld metal being extruded
from the joint to give some excess metal outside the joint (Fig. 8.10).
Fig.8.10. Single pass electron beam weld in 450 mm thick A5083 alloy. Note the
excess weld metal extruded on the weld face due to thermal contraction.
The major welding parameters are (a) the accelerating voltage, a 150 kV unit being
capable of penetrating 400 mm of aluminium; (b) the current applied to the electron
gun filament, generally measured in milliamperes; and (c) the travel speed. The
item to be welded is generally mounted on an NC manipulator, the gun being held
stationary. The unwelded joint components are required to be closely fitting and are
usually machined. Filler metal is not normally added but if gaps are present this
leads to concavity of the weld face.
The major drawback with this process is the need to carry out the welding in a
vacuum chamber evacuated to around 10− 3 to 10− 2 Pa. This requires expensive
diffusion pumps and a hermetically sealed chamber large enough to accommodate
the item to be welded. The cost of equipment, the accuracy with which components
have to be machined to provide an accurate fit-up and the time taken to pump
the chamber down can make the process non-competitive with more conventional
fusion welding processes. For high-precision welding, perhaps of finished machined
items where minimal distortion is required and for batch type applications where a
number of items can be loaded into the chamber the process is capable of providing
excellent results in a cost-effective manner.
Welding the aluminium alloys with the electron beam process presents one problem
specific to the process, that of metal vapour from the weld pool causing arcing
inside the electron beam gun. This is a particular problem with those alloys that
contain low boiling point alloys such as magnesium and zinc. Arcing inside the gun
interrupts the beam and causes cavities to be formed in the weld. This problem may
be avoided by trapping the vapour by changing the beam path with a magnetic field
or by shutting off the beam as soon as arcing is detected and re-establishing the
beam immediately the vapour has dispersed. This can be done extremely rapidly,
the weld pool remains molten and cavity formation is avoided. Although some of the
alloying elements, i.e. magnesium and zinc, are lost, this is generally insufficient to
cause a loss of strength. Elongated cavities in the fade- out region may be produced,
particularly in circular components where a run-off tab cannot be used. These may
be avoided by careful control of the travel speed and beam fade-out.
The non-heat-treatable alloys can be welded fairly readily without the addition of
filler wire but hot cracking problems may be encountered in the more sensitive
grades and in the heat-treatable alloys. As with laser welding, wire additions may
help. Heat affected zones are small and strength losses are less than would be
experienced in a similar thickness arc welded joint.
The electron beam gun and working chamber are evacuated, since the electrons
are deflected in the atmosphere which contained much heavier molecules. In the
working chamber, the parts to be welded are placed on appropriate devices and
moved relative to the beam.
Before electron beam welding, apparatus and parts to be welded had to be demag-
netized, since residual field strength of more than 1.5 Oe at the surface deflects the
beam.
With the electron beam, almost all metals can be welded. A particular advantage
of the method is that refractory or gas-sensitive metals and alloys are welded.
When welding steels, pore formation may occur when the contents of sulfur and
phosphorus are too high. With too high C content may result from the high cooling
involve material hardness increases, the corresponding degraded by heat treatment
immediately after welding must be done.
The forged titanium materials have good weldability, but the cast types have limi-
tations. Heat-resistant metals such as molybdenum, tungsten, tantalum, niobium,
and zirconium can be welded. The process has been proven for the welding of
aluminum alloys; even the hardenable Al alloys AlCuMg and AlZnMgCu can be
welded. However, Ni, Ni–Fe, or Co-based precipitation hardenable materials cause
difficulties. The advantages in electron beam welding are the high welding
performance and the low heat transfer to the base material.
A disadvantage is that the required vacuum chamber due to the size of the compo-
nents had restrictions imposed. For the welding of large components, devices with
a local vacuum to the welding point can be used. Here, the beam generator moves
the beam during welding in a stationary-sealed region.
1 Reconstitution Techniques
In the 1970s the electron-beam welding technique was used at Siemens/KWU to
prepare relatively large test specimens from small amounts of “insert” material
(Klausnitzer 1971). Gradually the amount of insert material was reduced and the
technique was adapted to reconstruct specimens from broken standard Charpy
samples used in surveillance programs (Klausnitzer 1976). Alternative preparation
techniques for “simple” reconstituted Charpy specimens were evaluated. This led
in the early 1980s to the application of arc stud welding on broken Charpy halves
at Batelle Columbus Laboratories (Perrin et al. 1982). This technique was adopted
and improved by several research institutes (Valo 1991, van Walle et al. 1991a).It
was applied to other geometries, e.g., tensile specimens (van Walle et al. 1991b)
and mini Charpy V-samples (Ahlstrand et al. 1993). Parallel developments led to the
application of projection welding, a resistance welding technique, to the reconstitu-
tion of Charpy specimens (Shogan et al. 1986). The upset butt welding technique
for Charpy reconstitution—a variation of projection welding—was introduced in
1991 and results of laser welding on broken Charpy halves have been reported
by Manahan et al. (1993). Some preparation techniques were less successful: for
instance, the gluing of end tabs to insert material remains limited to the precracked
Charpy impact specimen geometry (Ghoneim et al. 1992) and to relatively low test
temperatures.
Figure 2. Arc stud welding equipment and welding in progress (inset) (courtesy of
SCKCEN).
13.1 Introduction
Fusion weldings, such as arc, electron beam weldings and laser welding, are com-
monly used to assemble a wide range of metal structures, ships, automobiles and
passenger trains for example, because of their high productivity and advantages
in weight saving. However, distortion and residual stress are formed as unavoid-
able consequences. Figure 13.1 shows the typical forms of welding distortions.
Transverse shrinkage, longitudinal shrinkage and angular distortions are the three
fundamental modes of welding deformations. The welding distortions observed in
real welded structures are a combination of these modes. When the plate is thin
and the heat input is large relative to the plate thickness, buckling type distortion
can be produced by welding. Welding distortion is one of the major causes of the
dimensional error of welded structures and the deflection of panels reduces the
buckling and the load carrying capacity of thin plate welded structures. If the welding
distortion exceeds the tolerable limit, it may cause delay in production schedules and
reduces the productivity due to additional correction works.
13.1. Typical welding distortions: (a) transverse shrinkage; (b) longitudinal shrinkage;
(c) angular distortion; (d) rotational deformation.
13.2. Schema of welding residual stress distribution: (a) stress in welding direction
(b) stress in transverse direction.
As will be discussed in this chapter, the magnitude of the welding distortion and
the residual stress are strongly influenced by the welding heat input. Generally,
the magnitude of the welding distortion and the residual stress increase with the
heat input. In this sense, high energy density welding such as laser welding is
advantageous because it requires smaller heat input compared to conventional arc
welding.
The welding distortion and the residual stress are produced as an undesirable
consequence of the thermal cycle generated by the heat concentrated in a small area.
The same mechanism can be utilized to form or bend plate to a desired curved shape
by controlling the heat given to the plate. Since laser is superior in controllability,
it can be used to form flat plate to arbitrary 3D curved shapes for shipbuilding
applications and it can be employed for fine adjustment of the geometry of machine
parts. Also it can be employed to mitigate or improve the residual stress distribution
of welded structures, such as the pressure vessels in power plant.
1.1 Introduction
Tungsten inert gas (TIG), metal inert gas (MIG), electron beam and laser welding
processes have been used for creating tailor welded blanks TWBs. However, due to
the small heat-affected zone (HAZ) and fusion zone, the laser and electron beam
welding processes produce less impact on the material properties than others. Laser
welding has been the most frequently used process for producing TWBs due to the
lower cost and greater flexibility compared to those of electron beam welding. For
this reason, laser welding will be the focus of the material in this chapter.
Most weld imperfections are related to the weld geometry or chemical contents
of the base materials. Improper fit-up between the two joining metal sheets is a
major cause of imperfections related to weld geometry, such as concavity, mismatch
and sporadic welds (i.e. a weld that does not have consistent weld geometry and is
mostly a mixture of good weld and bad weld in short sections). Impurities or gaseous
elements, such as oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen, embedded in the material or
introduced to the weld during the welding process can also create imperfections in
the weld, such as porosity, pinholes or craters. The acceptance of a weld imperfection
is normally determined by the application of the welded product. A pinhole or crater
can be a defect for one product that undergoes a post-weld deep forming process
and an accepted weld imperfection if no forming is required. Examples used in
this chapter are based on a typical TWB joining two blanks of 1 mm and 2 mm in
thickness.
Tests and measurement of weld integrity are divided into two categories, de-
structive and non-destructive. The most common destructive tests on TWBs are
cross-sectioning, micro-hardness test, tensile test, bend test and formability test.
These tests are used to understand the mechanical and metallurgical properties as
well as the geometrical integrity of the weld. Destructive tests are normally time
consuming. In some cases, fatigue tests are performed on welded parts that are
subject to applications under cyclic loading. Non-destructive testing is desired for
production part inspection, especially in mass production. Most non-destructive
testing systems are designed to determine the geometrical integrity of the weld in
the fusion zone. These systems are normally vision, ultrasound or electromagnetic
based. When a non-destructive testing system is able to perform the inspection
faster than the welding speed, such a system can then be used for real-time weld
quality monitoring.