Prediction of shear and tensile strength of the diffusion bonded AA5083 and AA7075 aluminium alloy using ANN.

Diffusion bonding is a pressure welding technique to establish bonds by inter diffusion of atoms. Bonding characteristics were generated by varying the significant process conditions such as the bonding temperature, the pressing load and the duration of pressure while bonding the aluminium alloys AA5083 and AA7075. Deriving analytical correlation with the process variables to weld strength is quite involved due to the non-linear dependency of the process variables with the mechanical strength of the joints. An arbitrary function approximation mechanism, the artificial neural network (ANN) is therefore employed to develop the models for predicting the mechanical properties of the bonded joints. Back propagation technique, which alters the network weights to minimize the mean square error was used to develop the ANN models. The models were tested, validated and found to be satisfactory with good prediction accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]