High strength impact welding of NiTi and stainless steel wires

This work demonstrates the use of a solid-state microwelding process to create very high strength welds between superelastic NiTi and themselves as well as stainless steel (SS) wires. Vaporizing foil actuator welding (VFAW) uses the pressure from a vaporized metal foil to impact weld the wires by driving them into one another. The small scale nature of this explosive-like process allows its use in factories. Advanced techniques were used to examine the structures and properties of the welds that were created. The NiTi/SS welds had the typical wavy interface of ideal impact welds, with no thermally induced defects such as chemical segregation near the interface or brittle intermetallic formation. These latter two are significant issues in traditional fusion based methods. Microhardness tests show that the NiTi/NiTi and NiTi/SS weld interfaces were locally strengthened compared to the softening of other welding processes. Lap shear tests show that NiTi/SS welds made by VFAW present much higher joint efficiency (near 100%) compared to less than 60% for other traditional joining technologies. Tensile cycling of both the NiTi/NiTi and the NiTi/SS welds shows similar stabilization of the pseudoelastic curves as the NiTi base metal. The irrecoverable strains of the NiTi/NiTi welds and NiTi/SS welds after cycling were comparable to that in the NiTi base metal. The unparalleled performance of these high-strength solid-state similar and dissimilar welds of nitinol is a solution to the increasing demands of applications in various industrial fields including the medical, aerospace and electronic sectors.