Electron beam welding in the aerospace industry

Aero engine

The benefit of this joining technology is in increasing the range of alloys and thicknesses that can be welded to produce high integrity joints. The manufacture of high specification components in military and commercial aircraft, space vehicles, satellites, and rockets requires low heat input welds with minimum distortion.

Our expertise extends from welding small, precision, delicate assemblies to heavy section, structural welds. Our current welding capabilities presently range from controlled welds of about 100µm up to over 250mm.

The majority of projects have been conducted on aluminium, nickel, and titanium based alloys for airframe and engine components. Computer models have also been constructed using finite element analysis to determine the effect of electron beam welding on the final components.

TWI's world leading expertise in electron beam gun design has led to many manufacturing projects such as: completely new welding equipment, retrofitting of equipment to monitor beam quality, or deflecting the beam to follow controlled heating patterns. The latter can assist in the welding of difficult crack sensitive alloys, or can be used to create complex surface modification or profiling of aerospace components.

The following case study is of particular interest to the aerospace industry:

• Electron beam welding using advanced beam deflection techniques
• Comeld ^TM - joining composite materials to metals

More detailed information is available to TWI's Industrial Members:

• Electron beam texturing
• Development of equipment for electron beam characterisation
• An improved backscattered electron vision system for high power electron beam welding operation

Contact: electronbeam@twi.co.uk