A review of residual stress effects on fatigue properties of friction stir welds

Abstract

Friction stir welding (FSW) is now widely used in industrial manufacturing fields to join metal materials. Although it avoids solidification cracking, the combination of thermal excursion and plastic deformation introduces significant residual stresses. These residual stresses will combine with the applied stresses in service to cause unexpected failure. Therefore, a detailed knowledge of the residual stress effects on fatigue characteristics of FSWs is required. In this review, the experimental, theoretical and numerical studies of residual stress effects on fatigue characteristics of FSWs are summarized, including fatigue crack initiation, fatigue crack growth, stress-life and residual stress relaxation. The applications of residual stress modification techniques for fatigue improvement in FSWs are also presented.

Keywords:

• Residual stress
• fatigue properties
• friction stir welding

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Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this article.

Acknowledgment

The authors are grateful to Prof. P. J. Withers from the Henry Royce Institute, Department of Materials, The University of Manchester for his very useful comments and suggestions on this work.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 91860128, 12032018 and 52061135101).