PROCESS OPTIMIZATION OF GMAW OVER AA6351 ALUMINIUM ALLOY USING ANN

Welding of Aluminium and its alloys are becoming very crucial and increasingly significant now-a-days. Researchers around the world are taking up the challenges in analyzing the weldability of aluminium and its alloys. One of the aluminium alloy AA6351 is used for its medium strength with good fatigue and impact resistance and for its extrusion property. Only few researches have been done regarding welding of Aluminium AA6351 using GMAW welding process. In this paper, efforts are made to study welding of GMAW over AA6351 and to examine the optimum weld parameters for the same. Taguchi L9 orthogonal array deign is used to conduct the experimental runs. The controllable parameters which affect the GMAW process that are considered in this paper are welding current, shielding gas flow rate and electrode feed rate. Parameters that are affecting the weld bead geometry which are related directly to the weld bead viz. weld bead width, penetration depth, reinforcement height, dilution percentage are considered as responses. The GMAW welding process is optimized using Artificial Neural Network in MATLAB® software with respect to the maximum percentage of dilution.