Fusion zone microstructure image dataset of the flux-cored and shielded metal arc welding processes

This paper presents high quality (2048 × 1532 pixels) Light Microscope steel images sampled from the welding fusion zone. The microstructure images were acquired from the Design of Experiments (2² full factorial design) planned to compare two different arc welding processes at two different arc welding energies [1]. The 400 raw images appear as they were captured by the microscope and they are categorized into four groups: that acquired from the Flux Cored Arc Welding process and that acquired from the Shielded Metal Arc Welding process; both of them run for high and low levels of arc energy. For the Flux Cored Arc Welding process, ASME SFA 5.20 E71T-5C(M) tubular wire was used, with a nominal diameter of 1.2 mm. For the Shielded Metal Arc Welding process, AWS E7018 coated electrodes were used, with nominal diameters of 3.25 mm (for the low energy level) and 5.00 mm (for the high energy level). The deposition of the beads was run on AISI 1010 steel plates in the flat position (bead-on-plate). Different proportions of primary grain boundary ferrite; polygonal ferrite; acicular ferrite; nonaligned side-plate ferrite and aligned side-plate ferrite can be observed in each image. This image dataset is ready to visual and automatic microstructure recognition and quantification. It can be a useful resource for computational intelligence research teams, e.g. [2], by offering images for handling as filtering, feature extraction, training, validation and testing in pattern recognition and machine learning techniques.