Ultrasonic diagnosis of spot welding in thin plates

Spot welding widely used in automotive and aerospace industries has made it possible to produce more precise and smaller electric part by robotization and systemization of welding process. The quality of welding depends upon the size of nugget between the overlapped steel plates. Recently, the thickness of the steel plates becomes much thinner and hence, it introduces the smaller size of nugget. Therefore, it is necessary to develop the criterion to evaluate the quality of weld in order to obtain the optimal welding conditions for the better performance. In this paper, a thin steel plates, 0.1 mm through 0.3 mm thickness, have been spot-welded at different welding conditions and the nugget sizes are examined by defocused scanning microscopy. The relationships between nugget sizes and weldability have been investigated experimentally. The result of ultrasonic technique shows the good agreement with that of the tensile test.