Induction Assisted Welding Technologies in Steel Utilisation

Coming from automotive applications, high strength steel grades to be applied in lightweight
construction are more and more required in many industrial sectors as construction,
agricultural machinery or shipbuilding industry. Beside this weight saving aspects, demands
like a high wear resistance combined with high toughness at a wide temperature range are
important for these applications. However, fundamental metallurgical facts cause these
steels to be relatively difficult to weld. As modern high strength steels are manufactured
using more and more complex thermo mechanical treatment techniques, a loss of the base
material properties after welding is identified to be the core of these problems. Moreover,
these steel grades contain a relatively high amount of carbon that leads to significantly increased
hardness and cold crack occurrence caused by martensite formation in the weld.
Future development of steels with even higher carbon content will accentuate this problem.
The existing limitations as insufficient fatigue strength can be overcome by the use of appropriate
welding methods as laser GMA hybrid welding combined with induction heating.
Thus, an adaption of weld seam properties to the base materials properties will be enabled.
Benefits expected from the research:
• Detailed, application-related understanding of the interaction between induction and
welding processes
• Concrete knowledge about the metallurgical and mechanical weld seam properties of
induction assisted welded steel
• Increased use of high strength steels to gain benefit of both cost saving and raw material
saving aspects
Main goals of the project:
• Enable an inceased use of high strength steels for a number new industrial applications
• Improvement of weld performance and reduction of rework
• Providing new induction assisted welding processes suitable for mass production