Study of friction stir spot welding for thermotolerant engineering thermoplastic polyimide joints

In this research, thermoplastic polyimide (TPI) were welding via friction stir spot welding (FSSW) in order to evaluate the feasibility of the technology. The welding tool with a tri-flute pin was used for keeping the welding effectiveness. The effect of the rotation speed and dwell time on the microstructure and shear strength was studied. The results shows that the number of gap defects between the shoulder affect zone and the pin affect zone decreased with the increase of the rotation speed. The boundary of the shoulder affect zone and the pin affect zone was no clear when increasing the dwell time from 10 s to 20 s. Long dwell time could increase the mixing time and reduce the materials viscosity, which made the structure was denser. The maximal shear strength was obtained 85.5% of the base materials. The differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) results indicated that the melting behaviour of different regions was no obvious difference. It indicated that FSSW had a feasible and potential technology to join the high temperature resistant engineering plastics.