Development of a novel test rig to investigate the fundamentals of impact welding

•A novel test rig to examine the principles of impact welding has been developed.•Numerical analyses of the impact conditions have been performed.•Microscopic investigation of the welded samples has been conducted.•The joints of the test rig and the real process are comparable.•The test rig can represent all stages of electromagnetic pulse welding.

Despite the great technological advantages of impact welding, its application is still not widely spread. One reason is the poor understanding of its mechanisms and the effects on the bond strength. In this paper, a novel test rig is presented, which allows the straightforward investigation of impact welding and its basic principles to help filling this gap of knowledge. Impact angle and velocity, which are known to be the most important process parameters, can now be freely and almost independently varied over a large range of values. The built-up of the test rig and its functionality will be presented in this paper. Furthermore, first numerical and experimental results will be discussed and compared to an industrially implemented process. The investigations show that the test rig is capable of representing the high-speed collision of the real process.