Friction Surfacing Process Development for Repair and Remanufacturing of Steel Parts
Problem statement
Imagine that you are on a train to visit some old friends. You are excited and everything is going well until suddenly the train begins to rock. This gets progressively worse until eventually the train derails and crashes. You wake up with a throbbing headache and wreckage all around, but notice a section of railroad tracks beneath you that look badly worn. The reason the train derailed was from these worn railway tracks. Currently, the method to fix damaged railroad tracks is to butt weld two sections of rail. However, welding is a fusion process. When melting metal, hot or cold cracking can occur, leading to an endless cycle of increased cracks, cost, and time. Friction surfacing is a solid-state technique that is below the solidus temperature of the material, allowing more fully-dense, fine-grained, and tougher repairs. Friction surfacing opens up the potential to repair damaged rail rather than replace large pieces entirely. Therefore, friction surfacing has fewer metallurgical defects and has the potential to be an improvement over traditional welding for the repair of damaged metals. Currently, there is little data on friction surfacing and our client needs a distinct process that determines the acceptable process parameters for performance. Right now, our client uses trial and error based on previous research papers to find the acceptable operating conditions. This is often time-inefficient and useful for a narrow group of materials. Designing a process that quickly determines parameters would be applicable to a large group of alloys and could potentially open up more applications for friction surfacing. On the other hand, certain feasibility aspects need to be analyzed in order to determine the potential advantages of friction surfacing. Ultimately, our solution will result in a procedure of suitable specifications for friction surfacing, prove that this can be applied to multiple alloys, and point out the differences in friction surfacing compared to traditional welding methods.
Team members
Arjun Patel – leader
Willem Fellman – communicator
Christian Fuhrmann – accountant
Carter Hauge – admin
Client
Mr. Hemant Agiwal, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering