Friction Stir Welding of Steel Structures - A Brief Review

Abstract

Friction stir welding is a relatively new technique, developed in 1991, which, due to its advantages, has been continuously developed and applied to industrial applications. This process of joining materials in solid state is an extremely complex one because of the physical phenomena that occur during the process, which makes the research still in full development. The paper presents an analysis of recent scientific work on the use of the FSW process for the joining of steel structures. Thus, the types of steels and merged structures, the processes used and the technological parameters used are analyzed. On the basis of this analysis, the main conclusions of the studied works are summarized and the main development directions for research on the FSW process of steel structures are identified.