Material flow analysis in friction stir consolidation during recycling aluminum alloy chips

Friction stir consolidation (FSC) is a solid-state process primarily employed to recycle aluminum machining scrap with the aim to meet the increasing demand of aluminum within the framework of sustainability goals. This technology has recently drawn the attention of many researchers due to its potential beyond the recycling approach to offer plausible new routes for alloying and upcycling metal scraps. Concerning the FSC process, a rotating tool with a certain force is applied to a given batch of chips mass enclosed inside a die chamber turning it into a consolidated billet by friction and stirring action of the tool. The obtained samples are characterized by non-homogenous properties as the non-symmetric nature of the process and therefore different strain levels occur while producing the recycled billet. This study was focused on developing a proper experimental setup to visualize material flow supported with preliminary numerical simulation. The adopted approach led to reveal the deformation during the FSC process in different billet regions by visualizing the shape change of the pre-embedded copper marker in the billet.