POOL MONITORING IN GMAW

This paper describes a weld pool monitoring technique, which is based on the weld pool image analysis. The proposed image analysis algorithm uses machine vision techniques to extract geometrical information from the weld pool image such as maximum weld pool width, gap width and misalignment between the joint longitudinal axis and the welding wire. These can be related to the welding parameters (welding voltage and current, wire feed speed and standoff) to produce control actions necessary to ensure that the required weld quality will be achieved. The experiments have shown that the algorithm is able to produce good estimates of the weld pool geometry; however, the adjustment of the camera parameters affects the image quality and, consequently, has a great influence over the estimation.