Forecasting FSW Material’s Behavior using an Artificial Intelligence-Driven Approach

A flexible data-driven methodology was developed to forecast the mechanical behavior of an aluminum alloy, namely Al6061-T6, in the case of friction stir welding. Specifically, Gated recurrent unit (GRU), a deep learning model, was investigated in this study. This is the first time the GRU model has been used to forecast the stress-strain curve of a material. The major features of the GRU consist in its ability to model time-series data and rely only on historical and actual data from the investigated material. The performance of the GRU model has been demonstrated based on actual data collected by conducting uniaxial tensile testing on the base material, and friction stirred welded, both tested at a deformation speed of 10−3s−1. Forecasting tensile tests results showed promising and accurate results of the GRU-driven forecasting.