Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is a state-of-the-art solid-state joining technique that has gained increasing attention in recent years due to its ability to produce high-quality welds in lightweight alloys. It uses a non-consumed rotating tool to generate frictional heat, softening the material, and stirring it, resulting in material joining by mixing and plastic deformation. Unlike conventional fusion welding, FSW avoids melting the base material, thereby minimizing common defects such as porosity, hot cracking, and distortion. This makes it particularly effective for joining aluminum alloys, which are widely used in the aerospace, automotive, and shipbuilding industries for their superior strength-to-weight ratio. In this study, the FSW process for different pin and shoulder geometries and process parameters is simulated using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method. The fully coupled SPH model includes material bonding, nonlinear temperature-dependent plasticity, slip–stick friction, and various physical effects involved during the FSW process. This numerical investigation of FSW allows the simulation of different welding scenarios and tools in order to understand the influence of different designs before implementing them physically, allowing prediction of defects and optimization of the process. The tool is modeled using an undeformable triangular mesh, which serves as a solid boundary and performs interaction with the material. In this study, 3.8 mm-thick AA2024-T3 plates are friction stir welded using some industrially used tools with different geometries under welding process parameters of 900 rpm and 300 mm/min welding speed. In the simulation results, the material flow and nugget zone are compared to find the best mixing. Then, the simulation results are compared with experimental results to determine the influence of the pin and shoulder geometries on the weld quality.

The videos provided show the simulation results for different tool geometries and process parameters used in the FSW process.