Optimal pass planning for robotic welding of large-dimension joints with nonuniform grooves

Author(s):  
SJ Yan ◽  
HC Fang ◽  
SK Ong ◽  
AYC Nee

Large-dimension welded joints are widely used in shipyards and oilfields. These joints typically have thick and nonuniform welding grooves, thus requiring multi-pass welding processes and tens of hours to complete. Although the development of robotic welding systems can shorten the welding time, it is important to have a detailed plan of the entire process before welding starts. Welding pass planning is crucial for the subsequent robot trajectory generation and provides the welding sequence in a deep groove and the welding parameters of every pass. A knowledge database is used in this research to obtain the relationship between the bead geometry and the welding parameters. A layer-by-layer welding pass planning scheme is proposed to address the nonuniform groove geometry, and an optimization method is proposed with the objective to maximize the section area of the weld bead, so that the number of passes can be minimized. The planning results show that the optimization method is able to provide feasible passes and welding parameters for every pass.

Author(s):  
Tanveer Majeed ◽  
Mohd Atif Wahid ◽  
Faizan Ali

An Industrial robot is reprogrammable, automatically controlled, multifunctional manipulator programmable in three or more axes, which may be either fixed in place or mobile for use in industrial automation applications. Technical innovations in robotic welding has facilitated manual welding processes in sever working conditions with enormous heat and fumes to be replaced with robotic welding. The robotic welding has greater capability to control robot motion, welding parameters and enhanced wrong detection and wrong correction. Major difficulties in robotic welding are joint edge inspection, weld penetration control, seam tracking of joints, and width or profile measurement of a joint. These problems can be more easily solved by use of sensory feedback signals from weld joint.  Robotic welding system has intelligent and effective control system that can track the joint, monitor the joint in process and accounts for variation in joint location. Sensors play an important role in robotic welding systems with adaptive and intelligent control system features that can track the joint, account for variation in joint location and geometry monitor in-process quality of the weld. In this paper various aspects of robotic welding, robot programming, and problems associated with robot welding are undertaken.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2139 (1) ◽  
pp. 012008
Author(s):  
J L Lázaro Plata ◽  
C S Sánchez Rincón

Abstract Gas metal arc welding is one of the most influential processes in the production and repair of structures and equipment; therefore, the need to improve the productivity and quality of welded joints has led to the development of techniques for good control of welding parameters. Also, the development of semi-automatic welding processes led to the control of one of the variables such as pulsed current; this technique is characterized by a lower heat input and lower energy expenditure, which directly influences the structural quality of the welded joint and the geometry of the weld bead. This work focused on evaluating the effects of various welding operating parameters using the central composite design tool based on the response surface methodology; next, the experimental development employed an inverter type power source for weld depositions, a commercial grade Stargold clean 96% Ar and 4% CO2 shielding gas at the rate of 15 L/min stationary arc, a 1.2 mm metal cored wire for welding deposit and a carbon steel base plate with a thickness of 6 mm. During the welding process, the torch was kept at a 90° inclination and a 16 mm stroke. To examine the adequacy of the empirical models and the significance of the regression coefficients, the variance analysis was employed. Consequently, the graphs were obtained through the determination of the model; from the statistical results obtained, it was shown that the above models were adequate to predict the weld width, bead height, and penetration within the range of variables studied. Furthermore, it was observed that the wire feed rate it has a very marked effect on weld bead geometry, followed by frequency pulse and peak current; finally, the effectiveness of employing these methodologies for the management of variables attributing to the execution of welding tasks with higher accuracy was demonstrated.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 655-665
Author(s):  
Miso Bjelic ◽  
Karel Kovanda ◽  
Ladislav Kolařík ◽  
Miomir Vukicevic ◽  
Branko Radicevic

Simulation models of welding processes allow us to predict influence of welding parameters on the temperature field during welding and by means of temperature field and the influence to the weld geometry and microstructure. This article presents a numerical, finite-difference based model of heat transfer during welding of thin sheets. Unfortunately, accuracy of the model depends on many parameters, which cannot be accurately prescribed. In order to solve this problem, we have used simulated annealing optimization method in combination with presented numerical model. This way, we were able to determine uncertain values of heat source parameters, arc efficiency, emissivity and enhanced conductivity. The calibration procedure was made using thermocouple measurements of temperatures during welding for P355GH steel. The obtained results were used as input for simulation run. The results of simulation showed that represented calibration procedure could significantly improve reliability of heat transfer model.


Author(s):  
Yashwant Koli ◽  
N Yuvaraj ◽  
Aravindan Sivanandam ◽  
Vipin

Nowadays, rapid prototyping is an emerging trend that is followed by industries and auto sector on a large scale which produces intricate geometrical shapes for industrial applications. The wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) technique produces large scale industrial products which having intricate geometrical shapes, which is fabricated by layer by layer metal deposition. In this paper, the CMT technique is used to fabricate single-walled WAAM samples. CMT has a high deposition rate, lower thermal heat input and high cladding efficiency characteristics. Humping is a common defect encountered in the WAAM method which not only deteriorates the bead geometry/weld aesthetics but also limits the positional capability in the process. Humping defect also plays a vital role in the reduction of hardness and tensile strength of the fabricated WAAM sample. The humping defect can be controlled by using low heat input parameters which ultimately improves the mechanical properties of WAAM samples. Two types of path planning directions namely uni-directional and bi-directional are adopted in this paper. Results show that the optimum WAAM sample can be achieved by adopting a bi-directional strategy and operating with lower heat input process parameters. This avoids both material wastage and humping defect of the fabricated samples.


SIMULATION ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003754972110315
Author(s):  
B Girinath ◽  
N Siva Shanmugam

The present study deals with the extended version of our previous research work. In this article, for predicting the entire weld bead geometry and engineering stress–strain curve of the cold metal transfer (CMT) weldment, a MATLAB based application window (second version) is developed with certain modifications. In the first version, for predicting the entire weld bead geometry, apart from weld bead characteristics, x and y coordinates (24 from each) of the extracted points are considered. Finally, in the first version, 53 output values (five for weld bead characteristics and 48 for x and y coordinates) are predicted using both multiple regression analysis (MRA) and adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) technique to get an idea related to the complete weld bead geometry without performing the actual welding process. The obtained weld bead shapes using both the techniques are compared with the experimentally obtained bead shapes. Based on the results obtained from the first version and the knowledge acquired from literature, the complete shape of weld bead obtained using ANFIS is in good agreement with the experimentally obtained weld bead shape. This motivated us to adopt a hybrid technique known as ANFIS (combined artificial neural network and fuzzy features) alone in this paper for predicting the weld bead shape and engineering stress–strain curve of the welded joint. In the present study, an attempt is made to evaluate the accuracy of the prediction when the number of trials is reduced to half and increasing the number of data points from the macrograph to twice. Complete weld bead geometry and the engineering stress–strain curves were predicted against the input welding parameters (welding current and welding speed), fed by the user in the MATLAB application window. Finally, the entire weld bead geometries were predicted by both the first and the second version are compared and validated with the experimentally obtained weld bead shapes. The similar procedure was followed for predicting the engineering stress–strain curve to compare with experimental outcomes.


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.


Author(s):  
Philippe Mourgue ◽  
Vincent Robin ◽  
Philippe Gilles ◽  
Florence Gommez ◽  
Alexandre Brosse ◽  
...  

In Pressurized Water Reactors, most of heavy components and pipes have a large thickness and their manufacturing processes often require multi-pass welding. Despite the stiffness of these components, the distortion issue may be important for operational requirements (e.g. misalignment) or controllability reasons (Non Destructive Examinations have to be achievable, therefore ovalization should be limited). These requirements may be difficult to achieve by simply adjusting welding processes. Indeed because of the complexity of mechanisms involved during a welding operation and the high number of influencing parameters, this process is still essentially based on the experience of the welder. Furthermore the experimental estimation of the stress and distortion level in the component remains a difficult task that is subject to errors even if techniques are currently improved to become more accurate. These are the reasons why AREVA has put a large effort to improve welding numerical simulations, in order to have a better understanding of the involved physical phenomena and also to predict the residual state through the structure. Computational welding mechanics is used to qualify the manufacturing processes in the very early phase of the welded component design. Within the framework of a R&D program whose main objective was to improve tools for the numerical simulation of welding regarding industrial needs, AREVA has decided to validate new methodologies based on 3D computation by comparison with measurements. For this validation task the chosen industrial demonstrator was a Control Rod Drive Mechanism (CRDM) Nozzle with a J-groove attachment weld to the vessel head. For such an application, operations of post-joining straightening have to be limited, if not prohibited, because of their cost or the impossibility to use them in front of a steel giant. The control of distortion during welding operations is a key issue for which simulation can be of great help. Regarding distortion issues, both accurate metal deposit sequence modeling and respect of the real welding parameters are mandatory, especially for multi-pass operation on such a complex geometry. The aim of this paper is to present the simulation of the distortion of a peripheral adapter J-groove attachment weld mock-up. This new full 3D simulation improves the result of the previous one based on lumped pass deposits. It is the result of a fruitful collaboration between AREVA and ESI-Group.


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.


Author(s):  
Min Guo ◽  
Zhen Chen ◽  
Yu Luo

In this paper, welding induced deformation and residual stress of a multiply-stiffened plate is studied by means of sequentially coupled thermal elasto-plastic finite element method. For the purpose of enhancing calculation efficiency, the FE model combining shell and solid elements is employed in the analysis. A transient moving heat source is used in the numerical analysis to consider important welding parameters such as heat input, welding speed and welding sequences. The welding processes of three stiffeners being attached to a base plate by single-side welds are simulated according to assembly configurations. The influence of three welding sequences and the position of weld foot on distortions and residual stress are discussed. The results demonstrate the different characteristics of residual distortion and stress in the multiply-stiffened plate by different welding sequences. The position of weld foot affects the local distortion of panel between two adjacent stiffeners.


1989 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. C. Doumanidis ◽  
D. E. Hardt

The control of welding processes has received much attention in the past decade, with most attention placed on real-time tracking of weld seams. The actual process control has been investigated primarily in the context of weld bead geometry regulation, ignoring for the most part the metallurgical properties of the weld. This paper addresses the latter problem through development of a model for in-process control of thermally activated material properties of weld. In particular, a causal model relating accessible inputs to the outputs of weld bead area, heat affected zone width, and centerline cooling rate at a critical temperature is developed. Since the thermal system is a distributed parameter, nonlinear one, it is modelled numerically to provide a baseline of simulation information. Experiments are performed that measure the thermal response of actual weldments and are used to calibrate the simulation and then to verify the basic dynamics predicted. Simulation results are then used to derive a locally linear transfer function matrix relating inputs and outputs. These are shown to be nonstationary, depending strongly upon the operating point and the boundary conditions.


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