Application of Microcomputers to Automatic Weld Quality Control

1980 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Tomizuka ◽  
D. Dornfeld ◽  
M. Purcell

The demand for increased productivity of welding operations has led to the expanded use of computer control to allow higher production rates while maintaining weld quality. The charateristics of the gas metal arc welding process and the relationship between welding parameters, the desired output of the welding process, and the automation of the process are discussed. A strategy for two-axis welding torch positioning and velocity control is developed based on preview control techniques. To evaluate the applicability of the proposed control method the motion of heat source along different welding paths is simulated on an analog computer with on-line control of process time constants by an LSI-11 microcomputer. The simulation results show that high quality seam tracking can be accomplished by controlling the torch motion using the proposed method. The method appears to be suitable for on-line control of welding processes.

2013 ◽  
Vol 554-557 ◽  
pp. 977-984 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianluca D'Urso ◽  
Michela Longo ◽  
Claudio Giardini

Friction stir welding (FSW) has received increasing attention in recent years thanks to its advantages over traditional welding processes, reducing distortion and eliminating solidification defects. Since melting does not take place and joining occurs below the melting temperature of the material, this welding process allows to obtain a weld characterized by very high quality with low heat input, minimal distortion, no filler material, and no fumes. FSW is also highly efficient and it is characterized by improved environmental performance if compared to traditional welding methods. For instance, FSW is particularly advantageous in the pipeline industry because this innovative welding process usually entails reduction in energy usage of up to 80% if compared to conventional fusion welding processes. Moreover, also alloys normally difficult to be welded can be considered with this technique. The objective of the present study is to establish and to study the weldability of aluminum tubes by means of FSW process. The study shows preliminary results on circumferential FSW of AA6060-T6 aluminum tubes and the influence of the welding process on weld quality. The experimental campaign was performed on tubes having a thickness equal to 5 mm and an external diameter equal to 80 mm. Tubes were welded by means of a four axes CNC machine tool. Particular care was paid to the fabrication of the inner support for the tube. The mandrel was designed in order to guarantee limited bending during the welding process. Some preliminary tests were carried out by varying the welding parameters, namely feed rate (f) and rotational speed (S). A tool having conical shoulder and cylindrical pin was used. The weld quality investigation was based on tensile tests, microhardness and macrostructure analysis of the joints.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 8742
Author(s):  
Glauco Nobrega ◽  
Maria Sabrina Souza ◽  
Manuel Rodríguez-Martín ◽  
Pablo Rodríguez-Gonzálvez ◽  
João Ribeiro

In the present work, an analysis of different welding parameters was carried out on the welding of stainless-steel thin thickness tubes by the Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) process. The influence of three main parameters, welding voltage, movement angle, and welding current in the quality of the welds, was studied through a specifically designed experimental process based on the establishment of three different levels of values for each of these parameters. Weld quality is evaluated using destructive testing (macrographic analysis). Specifically, the width and root penetration of the weld bead were measured; however, some samples have been disregarded due to welding defects outside the permissible range or caused by excessive melting of the base metals. Data are interpreted, discussed, and analyzed using the Taguchi method and ANOVA analysis. From the analysis of variance, it was possible to identify the most influential parameter, the welding voltage, with a contribution of 43.55% for the welding penetration and 75.26% for the bead width, which should be considered in the designs of automatic welding processes to improve the quality of final welds.


2011 ◽  
Vol 264-265 ◽  
pp. 367-372
Author(s):  
Joon Sik Son ◽  
Il Soo Kim ◽  
H.H. Kim ◽  
H.H. Na ◽  
J.H. Lee

Recently, not only robotic welders have replaced human welders in many welding applications, but also reasonable seam tracking systems are commercially available. However, fully adequate process control systems have not been developed due to a lack of reliable sensors and mathematical models that correlate welding parameters to the bead geometry for the automated welding process. Especially, real-time quality control in automated welding process is an important factor contributing to higher productivity, lower costs and greater reliability of the bead geometry. In this paper, on-line empirical models with experimental results are proposed in order to be applicable for the prediction of bead geometry. For development of the proposed predicting model, an attempt has been made to apply for a several methods. For the more accurate prediction, the prediction variables are first used to the surface temperatures measured using infrared thermometers with the welding parameters (welding current, arc voltage, CTWD and gas flow rate) because the surface temperature are strongly related to the formation of the bead geometry. And the developed model has been carried out a learning each time data acquired.


Materials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 1494
Author(s):  
Ran Li ◽  
Manshu Dong ◽  
Hongming Gao

Bead size and shape are important considerations for industry design and quality detection. It is hard to deduce an appropriate mathematical model for predicting the bead geometry in a continually changing welding process due to the complex interrelationship between different welding parameters and the actual bead. In this paper, an artificial neural network model for predicting the bead geometry with changing welding speed was developed. The experiment was performed by a welding robot in gas metal arc welding process. The welding speed was stochastically changed during the welding process. By transient response tests, it was indicated that the changing welding speed had a spatial influence on bead geometry, which ranged from 10 mm backward to 22 mm forward with certain welding parameters. For this study, the input parameters of model were the spatial welding speed sequence, and the output parameters were bead width and reinforcement. The bead geometry was recognized by polynomial fitting of the profile coordinates, as measured by a structured laser light sensor. The results showed that the model with the structure of 33-6-2 had achieved high accuracy in both the training dataset and test dataset, which were 99% and 96%, respectively.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1766 ◽  
pp. 29-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.Y. Pérez Medina ◽  
M. Padovani ◽  
M. Merlin ◽  
A.F. Miranda Pérez ◽  
F.A. Reyes Valdés

ABSTRACTGas tungsten arc welding-tungsten inert gas (GTAW-TIG) is focused in literature as an alternative choice for joining high strength low alloy steels; this study is performed to compare the differences between gas metal arc welding-metal inert gas (GMAW-MIG) and GTAW welding processes. The aim of this study is to characterize microstructure of dissimilar transformation induced plasticity steels (TRIP) and martensitic welded joints by GMAW and GTAW welding processes. It was found that GMAW process lead to relatively high hardness in the HAZ of TRIP steel, indicating that the resultant microstructure was martensite. In the fusion zone (FZ), a mixture of phases consisting of bainite, ferrite and small areas of martensite were present. Similar phase’s mixtures were found in FZ of GTAW process. The presence of these mixtures of phases did not result in mechanical degradation when the GTAW samples were tested in lap shear tensile testing as the fracture occurred in the heat affected zone. In order to achieve light weight these result are benefits which is applied an autogenous process, where it was shown that without additional weight the out coming welding resulted in a high quality bead with homogeneous mechanical properties and a ductile morphology on the fracture surface. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was employed to obtain information about the specimens that provided evidence of ductile morphology.


2011 ◽  
Vol 409 ◽  
pp. 843-848
Author(s):  
David W. Heard ◽  
Julien Boselli ◽  
Raynald Gauvin ◽  
Mathieu Brochu

Aluminum-lithium (Al-Li) alloys are of interest to the aerospace and aeronautical industries as rising fuel costs and increasing environmental restrictions are promoting reductions in vehicle weight. However, Al-Li alloys suffer from several issues during fusion welding processes including solute segregation and depletion. Solid freeform fabrication (SFF) of materials is a repair or rapid prototyping process, in which the deposited feedstock is built-up via a layering process to the required geometry. Recent developments have led to the investigation of SFF processes via Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) capable of producing functional metallic components. A SFF process via GMAW would be instrumental in reducing costs associated with the production and repair of Al-Li components. Furthermore the newly developed Controlled-Short-Circuit-MIG (CSC-MIG) process provides the ability to control the weld parameters with a high degree of accuracy, thus enabling the optimization of the solidification parameters required to avoid solute depletion and segregation within an Al-Li alloy. The objective of this study is to develop the welding parameters required to avoid lithium depletion and segregation. In the present study weldments were produced via CSC-MIG process, using Al-Li 2199 sheet samples as the filler material. The residual lithium concentration within the weldments was then determined via Atomic Absorption (AA) and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS). The microstructure was analyzed using High Resolution Scanning Electron Microscopy (HR-SEM). Finally the mechanical properties of welded samples were determined through the application of hardness and tensile testing.


2013 ◽  
Vol 339 ◽  
pp. 700-705 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Lopez ◽  
Arturo Reyes ◽  
Patricia Zambrano

The effect of heat input on the transformation of retained austenite steels transformation induced plasticity (TRIP) was investigated in the heat affected zone (HAZ) of the Gas Metal Arc Welding GMAW process. The determination of retained austenite of the HAZ is important in optimizing the welding parameters when welding TRIP steels, because this will greatly influence the mechanical properties of the welding joint due to the transformation of residual austenite into martensite due to work hardening. Coupons were welded with high and low heat input for investigating the austenite transformation of the base metal due to heat applied by the welding process and was evaluated by optical microscopy and the method of X-Ray Diffraction (XRD). Data analyzed shows that the volume fraction of retained austenite in the HAZ increases with the heat input applied by the welding process, being greater as the heat input increase and decrease the cooling rate, this due to variation in the travel speed of the weld path.


1995 ◽  
Vol 117 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Banerjee ◽  
S. Govardhan ◽  
H. C. Wikle ◽  
J. Y. Liu ◽  
B. A. Chin

This paper describes a method for on-line weld geometry monitoring and control using a single front-side infrared sensor. Variations in plate thickness, shielding gas composition and minor element content are known to cause weld geometry changes. These changes in the weld geometry can be distinctly detected from an analysis of temperature gradients computed from infrared data. Deviations in temperature gradients were used to control the bead width and depth of penetration during the welding process. The analytical techniques described in this paper have been used to control gas tungsten arc and gas metal arc welding processes.


2021 ◽  
pp. 85-91
Author(s):  
А.С. Угловский ◽  
И.М. Соцкая ◽  
Е.В. Шешунова

Цель рассмотрения численного метода заключалась в получении подробных данных, позволяющих оценить проведение сварочного процесса: изменение объёма сварного шва, радиуса сварного шва, радиуса зоны термического влияния. При проведении моделирования авторами выведены зависимости параметров точечной сварки низкоуглеродистой стали толщиной до 3,2 мм. Данные зависимости будут определять качество сварных швов. Соответствующее сочетание параметров точечной сварки обеспечит прочное соединение и хорошее качество сварки. The purpose of the numerical method consideration was to obtain detailed data allowing evaluating the performance of the welding process: changing the volume of the weld, the radius of the weld, the radius of the weld-affected zone. During the simulation the authors have derived dependencies of the parameters of spot welding of low-carbon steel up to 3.2 mm thick. These dependencies will determine the quality of the welds. The correct combination of spot welding parameters will ensure a firm joint and good welding quality.


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