MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURING PROCESSES, cilt.22, sa.1, ss.102-106, 2007 (SCI-Expanded)
Typical friction welds are made by holding a non-rotating sample in contact with a rotating sample under constant or gradually increasing pressure until the interface reaches the welding temperature and then stopping pressure rotating to complete the weld. This process requires additional time and is labor intensive. Recently, several control systems have been introduced to the industry for improving the welding process such as conventional automatic control, microcontroller control, and Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). However, these processes have limitations either on materials selection or on visualization. In this study, continuous monitoring, control and recording are implemented. Computer-controlled platform for the simulation and control of mechanisms is based on a Microsoft Visual Basic environment. Welding parameters such as friction time, forge time and breaking time are entered with a keyboard and can be saved and used again. To show the feasibility and versatility of the study, the evaluation is used for sample joining. It has been observed that this system works successfully and gives good performance.