Plasma Stabilization and Control of Titanium Welding

Welding titanium is becoming increasingly important to the Army, and this trend will accelerate as low-cost titanium becomes available. To facilitate the use of titanium in a growing set of cost-sensitive applications, rapid, reliable, and inexpensive joining processes must be established. For high production rate applications, pulsed gas metal arc welding (P-GMAW) offers such a possibility, although much development work remains to optimize this process for widespread use. During Phase I, Erigo Technologies and its partner American Engineering and Manufacturing (AEM), with the support of Lincoln Electric, developed a new single-pulse P-GMAW waveform for titanium. The waveform development work will be continued in Phase II, with the end goal of producing a set of waveforms that covers most operating conditions for GMAW of titanium. In addition, we will investigate modifications to the shield gas flow of the GMAW torch to eliminate the requirement for a supplemental trailing shield.