Denny,
great! Thank you for replying!
It's a pleasure and - of course - a honor for me, to get to know you by the way of discussing interesting welding-topics in the forum. And so... to get to know one of exactly those experts I have mentioned in my previous post, having such a huge experience to share it with the welders community!
I understand you have to clean the gas-nozzle from time to time, when using filler-wires for MIG-Welding 5xxx-base-material-alloys, at least due to Magnesium-evaporation.
But however, from my personal experience basically I can not remember to have seen nozzle-gels or similar for using it in MIG-aluminum welding here in Germany. Therefore my high esteem for what "ssbn727" has collected on information regarding different agents, also usable (so far the advertisement) for aluminum-alloys.
In Germany, in GMA-Welding aluminum-alloys, I do personally not know any fabricator using anti-spatter agents or -gels. The worry about achieving probably welding-problems like explained in the "ALUMINUM Q&A"-article - in particular - porosity, seems too large compared with any perhaps possible benefits. However, what I personally know is - mainly in the field of the Automotive Industry - a new kind of gas-nozzles. As you certainly may imagine in automated GMA-Welding applications the issue of weld-cycle-time is much more "critical", compared with manual applications. This is due to the high-volume production conditions, mainly been calculated on basis of seconds or tenth parts of a second, respectively. The cleaning-procedure of the nozzle must thus being integrated mostly within the period between a welded car-body is removed off- and a new car-body is moving into the jig. In normal cases, i.e. GMA-steel-sheet metal-welding in the car-industry, the cleaning-procedure is also a generally important issue, but there anti-spatter agents can surely be used without greater problems. But in Aluminum car-body GMA-Welding, using thin sheet metals (1.0... 3.0 mm) mainly of 6xxx-alloys, the fabricators do strictly avoid and forbid the usage of anti-spatter agents (danger of porosity, arc-perturbations etc.). Therefore these manufacturers use the above mentioned modified gas-nozzles for automated GMA-Welding their aluminum car-bodies, combined with cleaning-stations being controlled by the Programmable Logic Controller. The "trick" is, that those nozzles have a special surface coating, avoiding the adhesion of spatter. But, really important is, these nozzles should not have to be cleaned like "conventional" copper-nozzles, i.e. by using a milling cutter, due to the coating would be removed from the surface and then the positive effect of anti-spatter adhesion would be lost (no more distinctions between conventional and surface coated nozzles). For cleaning these special nozzles, the car-builders use a special rounded brush instead of a milling cutter, being implemented into the automated cleaning-station. I have spoken several times to German aluminum-car-builder welding-engineers and they told me they have achieved sustainable beneficial results in using this mentioned combination and could increase the duty-cycle of the gas-nozzles at many times compared with conventional copper-nozzles. However, as far as I know, these nozzles are not being used in manual aluminum GMA-Welding applications, even only for automated MIG-Aluminum Welding.
Regards to you and all other appreciated colleagues,
Stephan