Experimental Investigation on Weld Joint Characterization of Thin Wall Structure Mild Steel Tube at Diverse Loading Condition

This paper aims to investigate the effect of input parameters on plateau stress and specific energy of thin-wall structure circular mild steel (MS) tube. 32 samples of tube have been fabricated in two sets, one is without weld (WOW) and another is with weld (WW), having same dimensions. The tube was made up of available commercial MS (AISI 1010). During compression test the value of plateau stress and specific energy are obtained at varying input parameters and compared the results between WOW and WW tube samples. And its chemical composition verified with the help of Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy test of the welded joint and parent material. Three optimization techniques are used in this study to validate the experimental results namely Taguchi method, Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Taguchi L16 orthogonal array are used to identify the most effective input parameters which affect the energy absorption behaviour. Percentage contribution of individual input parameters analyzed by ANOVA method and also ANN was performed for non-linear mapping of the input and output parameters which are influenced by compression test. Experimental results have been validated with the optimization technique results and found to be in good agreement with them.