Resistance spot welding process (RSW) is one of the vital manufacturing processes in automobiles and aerospace industries. The quality of the welds is characterized by shape and size of weld nuggets. In this research, a 2D axi-symmetric, mechanical-electric-thermo coupled model is developed in ANSYS® to study the behaviour of spot welding process. In this simulation, the phenomena of nugget formation and the effect of welding parameters on nugget formation and the temperature distribution on the Nimonic-90 sheets is formulated. Nimonic-90 alloy is an alloy of nickel and chromium (80/20). It is used in gas turbines and in aerospace industries. The objective of this paper is to optimize welding parameters for Nimonic-90 sheets by considering the different variations of the welding parameters such as welding current, sheet thickness, weld time and electrode force to obtain good quality weld nuggets. The validation of the simulation of RSW process using mild steel sheets has been done in this paper in accordance to the literature test results.
Keywords: ANSYS®, Resistance Spot Welding (RSW), Axi-symmetry, Temperature distribution.