A hot-cracking mitigation technique for gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) of high-strength aluminum alloy 2024 is presented. The proposed welding technique incorporates a trailing heat sink (an intense cooling source) with respect to the welding torch. The development of the mitigation technique was based on both detailed welding process simulation using advanced finite element techniques and systematic laboratory experiments.

The finite element methods were used to investigate the detailed thermo mechanical behavior of the weld metal that undergoes the brittle temperature range (BTR) during welding. As expected, a tensile deformation zone within the material BTR region was identified behind the weld pool under conventional GTA welding process conditions for the aluminum alloy studied. To mitigate hot cracking, the tensile zone behind the weld pool must be eliminated or reduced to a satisfactory level if the weld metal hot ductility cannot be further improved. With detailed computational modeling, it was found that by the introduction of a trailing heat sink at some distance behind the welding arc, the tensile strain rate with respect to temperature in the zone encompassing the BTR region can be significantly reduced. A series of parametric studies were also conducted to derive optimal process parameters for the trailing heat sink. The experimental