원주 TIG 용접에서 이면 비드 형상 제어를 위한 Filter Wire 송급힘과 용접자세의 상관관계에 대한 연구

A study on the mapping between the feeding force of filter wire and welding position for the control of back bead shape in orbital TIG welding

In TIG welding of pipe, back bead size monitoring is important for weld quality assurance. Many researches have been performed on estimation of the back bead size by heat conduction analysis. However numerical conduction model based on many uncertain thermal parameters causes remarkable errors and thermomechanical phenomena in molten pool can not be considered. In this paper, filler wire feeding force in addition to weld current, wire feedrate, torch travel speed and orbital position angle is monitored to estimate back bead size in orbital TIG welding. Monitored welding process variables are fed into an artificial neural network estimator which has been trained with the monitored process variables (input patterns) and actual back bead size (output patterns). Experimental verification of the proposed estimation method was performed. The predicted results are in a good agreement with the actual back bead shape. The results are quite promising in that estimation of invisible back bead shape can be achieved by analyzing the welding parameters without any conventional NDT of welds.