Abstract
For the last two decades, waveform control techniques have been successively developed and applied for the inverter welding machines resulting in the substantial reduction of spatter generated in CO₂ welding. One of the constituents commonly involved in those techniques is to delay the instant of current increase to some extent after the initiation of short-circuiting. Although this technique has been known to be quite effective in reducing the spatter generation through the suppression of is instantaneous short circuiting, the delay time necessary for minimum spatter has not been clearly understood. In this study, the control system for varying the delay time was constructed so that the spatter generation rates could be measured over a wide range of delay time, 0.29-2.0 msec. As a result of this study, it was demonstrated that spatter generation rate(SGR) sharply decreased at delay time of 0.6 msec and longer accompanied with the change in characteristics of short circuit mode from the instantaneous short-circuiting(ISC) dominant to normal short-circuiting(NSC) dominant. Another feature that have been found in current waveform of over 0.6msec was the creation of current pulse right after the arc reignition stage. Because of this current pulses weld pool oscillated in wave-like fashion and it looks like to play an important role in developing short circuiting between electrode and weld pool.
