Читать книгу Arc Welding Processes Handbook - Ramesh Kumar Singh - Страница 18

When we speak of welding, various images comes to our minds. Depending on persons’ knowledge and experience with the process that can be various, simple or complex. But one thing that can be common to all those images and pictures is that the process of joining two pieces of metal to create a useful object.

This establishes one aspect of the term welding, that is, that the welding is a metal joining process. Let us explore a little more about what is welding, and how it is different from other Joining processes?

There have been discussions and sometimes arguments on describing if welding is an art or a science. Mundane as it might appear the question is pertinent and, in my experience, some well-meaning experts often miss the point as to which part about the term “welding” they are referring about to support their arguments. Welding as the physical and practical part of joining two materials in most part is an art, it requires dexterity in hand, and hand-eye coordination to do a good job. However, the study of the heat and melt flow solidifications prediction, prediction of material behavior under heating and cooling cycles associated with the term welding is a science, an essential pat under the science of physics. Hence it is both an art, and a science of joining metals by use of adhesive and cohesive forces between metals by welding, brazing, and soldering some of these joining processes produce metallurgical bonds. Person with the balanced knowledge of both science, and art parts of welding is expected to do much better work on either side of the argumentative divide. Further we get into the depth of the study, the line of separation from art to physics starts to become more evident.

Both process metallurgy and physical metallurgy is involved in welding. Welding is a unique metallurgical activity as it involves a series of metallurgical operations similar to metal production, like steelmaking and casting but in a rapid succession and on a very small scale. In science side of welding the thrust of the study is on the materials behavior during application of localized heat, and cooling and solidification physics.