Applied Welding Metallurgy and Weldability

Most catastrophic weld failures are not random accidents. Looking back, almost every one traces to a metallurgical event that was, in principle, predictable: a hardened heat-affected zone that cracked days after fabrication, a solidifying weld pool torn apart while a thin liquid film still wetted its grain boundaries, or a stainless joint quietly weakened along a corrosion path that no one saw forming. The physics was there the whole time. The question is whether the person running the procedure had the tools to see it coming.
That is the real difficulty facing welding engineers, materials engineers, inspectors, and fabrication specialists today. Modern work rarely stays inside one alloy family, yet the reference material available tends to split each alloy family into its own separate, specialized volume, forcing the reader to assemble a shelf rather than open a book. Add in newer concerns, such as advanced high-strength automotive steels that fail in ways older texts never anticipated and metal additive manufacturing processes that are really welding metallurgy by another name, and the gap between what is available and what the job requires only grows.
This book closes that gap. Organized in four parts, foundations, cracking mechanisms, alloy families, and modern practice, it gathers the metallurgy of weld cracking, the assessment tools used to predict it, and the alloy-by-alloy guidance needed to prevent it into one structured resource, rebuilding the underlying metallurgical foundation from first principles so that no separate background course is assumed.

Inside, you'll learn to:

• Understand why a weld cracks, using a single, repeatable framework that applies to every mechanism in the book.
• Calculate heat input, cooling time, hardenability, and preheat requirements from the governing physics, then apply those calculations to real procedure decisions.
• Recognize and distinguish each major cracking mechanism, including hydrogen-assisted, solidification, liquation, reheat, ductility-dip, and strain-age cracking, along with lamellar tearing and liquid-metal embrittlement, by where and when each one appears.
• Apply alloy-specific weldability guidance across carbon and low-alloy steels, the stainless steel families, nickel-base alloys, aluminum, titanium, copper, and magnesium, plus dissimilar-metal and multi-material joints.
• Interpret hardness surveys, hot-ductility data, and other weldability test results in real procedure-qualification decisions.
• Work through chapter-by-chapter practice problems with worked answer keys, supported by a glossary, list of symbols, and formula appendices.
• Carry the same reasoning forward into metal additive manufacturing, where rapid solidification and repeated thermal cycles raise many of the same questions in a new form.