Influence of welding current on bead profile and mechanical properties of double sided submerged arc welding of AISI 304 austenitic stainless steel

Submerged arc welding is a high productivity process for joining thick sections of steels, used particularly in ship building, pipe welding, construction applications and surfacing. In the present work double sided submerged arc welded was performed on 12 mm thick austenitic stainless steel plates to determine the effect of welding current on bead profile and mechanical properties. As the welding current increases, reinforcement height, reinforcement area, penetration depth and area, bead overlap area are found to show improvement in almost linear fashion. The welding current doesn’t much influence the weld bead width. The average bead contact angle decreased with increase in welding current. The tensile properties were found to increase steeply with increase in welding current. Two different morphologies of δ ferrite namely, skeletal and lathy structures were observed in the fusion zone.