Abstract
Magnesium alloy has been focussed as lightweight material owing to its high strength even though low density with aluminum alloy, titanium alloy and plastic material. Friction stir welding technique was performed by rotating and plunging a shouldered tool with a small diameter pin into the joint line between two butted plates and useful to join magnesium alloy. In this paper, the experiments of friction stir welding were done to investigate the joint characteristics of AZ31 magnesium alloy. For its evaluation, the orthogonal array method$(L_{27}(3^{13}))$ was applied with four factors of pin diameter, shoulder diameter, travel speed and rotation speed of tool and also three levels of each factor. Nine tools were worked through shoulder diameter of 9, 12, 15mm and pin root diameter of 3, 4, 5mm. In addition tensile tests were excuted for the assessment of mechanical properties for joint conditions. From the results, pin diameter, shoulder diameter, and rotating speed of tool influenced on the tensile strength meaningful, but welding speed did not influence on that by the variance analysis. Beside of that, optimum condition of tensile strength was estimated as following ; shoulder diameter:15mm, welding speed:200mm/min, rotating speed:200rpm.
