Research Article Experimental Evaluation and Characterization of Electron Beam Welding of 2219 AL-Alloy Mohamed Sobih, 1 Zuhair Elseddig, 2 Khalid Almazy, 1 and Mohamed Sallam 1 1 Military Technical College, Kobry El-Kobbah, Cairo 11766, Egypt 2 Sudanese Armed Forces, AL Khartoum, Sudan Correspondence should be addressed to Mohamed Sobih; m sobih@alumni.manchester.ac.uk Received 3 March 2016; Revised 22 June 2016; Accepted 21 July 2016 Academic Editor: Pradeep Lancy Menezes Copyright © 2016 Mohamed Sobih et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Aiming to reduce the weight of components, thus allowing a proft in terms of energy saving, automotive industry as well as aircraf industry extensively uses aluminum alloys. Te most widely used joining technology in aircraf industry is riveting, while welding seems to be used in the car industry in the case of aluminum alloys. However, welding technology is characterized by many defects, such as gas porosity; oxide inclusions; solidifcation cracking (hot tearing); and reduced strength in both the weld and the heat afected zones which could limit its development. Many techniques are used for aluminum alloys welding, among them is electron beam welding (EBW), which has unique advantages over other traditional fusion welding methods due to high-energy density, deep penetration, large depth-to-width ratio, and small heat afected zone. Te welding parameters that yield to optimal weld joint have been previously obtained. Tese optimal parameters were validated by welding a specimen using these parameters. To evaluate this optimal weld joint, complete, microstructural observations and characterization have been carried out using scanning electron microscopy, optical microscopy, and energy dispersive X-ray analysis. Tis evaluation leads to description and quantifcation of the solidifcation process within this weld joint. 1. Introduction Te desirable chemical, physical, and mechanical properties of aluminum make it the second widely used metal in industry. Additionally it represents an important category of technological materials [1]. Aluminum and its alloys are extensively used in chemical plants and food processing equipment. Certain aluminum copper alloys are used in aircraf while special alloys are used in manufacturing of some automobile parts. One of the most important benefts of using aluminum alloys in automotive industry is that every kilogram of aluminum, which may replace two kilograms of steel, can lead to a net reduction of 10 kg of CO 2 equivalents over the average lifetime of a vehicle [2]. However, there have been challenging weldability problems associated with aluminum alloys to overcome. Aluminum welding has many difculties compared with welding of most ferrous alloys in that there are no solid- state phase transformations upon cooling down. Tus, its microstructure is determined by solidifcation alone. Tere are, however, a number of problems associated with the welding of aluminum. Te features and defects that may contribute to the loss of properties comprise porosity, oxide inclusions, and hot cracking, [3–5]. In addition to fusion welding, several other types of joining techniques are also used and may ofen be associated with fewer difculties for producing aluminum joints. Tese are sold-state welding, for example, friction, resistance, and difusion welding, as well as brazing and soldering, adhesive bonding, and mechanical joining. Most of these techniques can eliminate the fusion problems because the base metals remain in the solid state during joining. Terefore, they are better than fusion welding in this respect [6]. However, the service conditions may make particular processes unsuitable; for example, for high-temperature applications, soldering and adhesive bonding cannot be candidates, and for leak-tight joints, mechanical joining is not acceptable. Furthermore, the required joint geometry can make friction welding difcult Hindawi Publishing Corporation Indian Journal of Materials Science Volume 2016, Article ID 5671532, 6 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2016/5671532