ABSTRACT
Although widely used and accepted throughout the world, tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding suffers from major drawbacks such as the inability to weld thick sections in a single pass and low rate of deposition. To counter these, flux-assisted welding was developed, in which a layer of activating flux such as silicon dioxide or titanium dioxide is applied on the weld metal. When the edges to be welded are completely masked by the fluxes, the process is known as activated tungsten inert gas welding. The presence of activating fluxes reverses the Marangoni convection currents within the weld pool and constricts the welding arc, resulting in high depth-to-width ratio. The advantages of activated tungsten inert gas (ATIG) welding over conventional, TIG, as well as other variants of the process such as flux-zoned tungsten inert gas (FZTIG) welding and advanced activated tungsten inert gas (AATIG) welding, are also explored.
