Cylindrical Pin Embossment on A5083 Aluminum Alloy Substrate Fabricated by Friction Stir Forming
This paper reports friction-stir forming (FSF) of cylindrical pin embossments on JIS A5083 aluminum alloy medium gauge plate. A substrate material was put on an emboss die and conducted friction stirring on its back surface. The die has 1mm diameter and 0.5mm deep fine holes at 1.5mm pitch on its top, and the material successfully filled them due to high pressure and heat caused by friction stirring. Three tools having different shoulder diameter were utilized to investigate the deformable area with a single pass. As a consequence, faster spindle speed, slower tool feed rate, and larger tool shoulder contribute to a wider range of completely formed pins. Extrusion of the material to the die cavity seemed to be mostly limited under the area of the shoulder. The ratios of the band width of the complete pins to the shoulder diameter were increased with the larger diameter of the shoulder of the FSF tool. Therefore, a larger shoulder was more effective for wide-range embossing with a single pass. In addition, we evaluated the shape of formed pins with a non-contact 3D measurement system. Accuracy of the height of the completely formed pins was within ±0.013mm, which was comparable with machining.