The fabrication of brass reinforced aluminum matrix composites by FSW

Brass sheet is added into the joining location in friction stir welding (FSW). Brass reinforced Al matrix composite is then formed in the FSW nugget zone with brass. A new microstructure based mechanical property model is proposed to predict both the microstructural evolutions and mechanical property changes in FSW with brass. The discrepancy between the numerical and experimental data is 0.77% for temperature, 2.2% for average grain size, and 6.4% for hardness. The change of temperature is very small in comparison of FSW and FSW with brass. However, compared to FSW, the hardness is obviously increased and the average grain size is decreased by 34.8% in FSW with brass in the nugget zone due to the pinning effect from the broken brass particles. The process parameters can be numerically tested to find the optimal design for experiment.