Materials Joining Engineering Facilities

Most of the Materials Joining Engineering facilities are housed in a dedicated 7300-square-foot laboratory containing over a million dollars worth of equipment, virtually all of which is available to students for class projects and research experiments.  A partial listing is provided below. 

Joining Processes

• Shielded Metal Arc Welding (SMAW)
• Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW), AC/DC and pulsed-arc
• Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW), both continuous-wave and pulsed-wave
• Flux-Cored Arc Welding (FCAW), including metal-cored
• Submerged Arc Welding (SAW), solid and tubular wire electrodes
• Plasma Arc Welding (PAW)
• Oxyfuel Gas Welding (OFW)
• Resistance Spot Welding (RSW)
• Drawn-Arc Stud Welding
• Torch Brazing
• Vacuum Brazing
• Induction Brazing
• Soldering
• Adhesive Bonding of metals, polymers and ceramics
• Hot Plate and Hot Air Welding of thermoplastics
• Hybrid joining: WeldBonding, Riveting, GMAW Brazing, Atomic Hydrogen Welding
• Oxyfuel and Plasma Arc Cutting

Automation and Control

• Jetline Engineering dedicated automation (rectilinear and circumferential)
• Automatic GTAW welding with arc voltage control and magnetic arc oscillation
• Fanuc robotic cell (flexible automation)
• High-speed data acquisition system for arc waveform analysis in Pulsed GMAW and Stud welding
• 1.2 kW CO2 laser (to be replaced by a 1 kW Nd:YAG laser in 2006)

Weldability Testing

• Varestraint testing
• Gleeble 1500 thermomechanical simulator
• Gapped Bead-on-Plate (G-BOP)
• Tekken (Y-groove) testing
• Combinations of the above to predict solidification (hot) reheat, ductility dip (warm) and hydrogen induced (cold) cracking in ferrous and nonferrous alloys.
• Weldability prediction software “HAZ Calculator”

Characterization

• Metallographic preparation and examination
• High-resolution digital imaging
• Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)
• Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS)
• Stereo microscopy

Mechanical Testing

• Tensile/shear
• Rockwell hardness
• Vickers and Knoop microhardness
• Charpy impact

Nondestructive Evaluation

• Liquid Dye Penetrant
• Ultrasonic Testing
• Magnetic Particle Testing
• Wet Fluorescent Magnetic Particle Testing
• PC-based universal Eddy Current Testing

Design and Analytical Computing

• ALGOR
• SolidWorks/Cosmos
• Autocad
• Mathcad
• MATLAB
• Maple V