Weld Quality Assessment Method for Short-Circuit Mode in GMAW

A weld quality assessment method is proposed in this work, which can be applied to the short-circuit mode in GMAW. Information about the welding signal trajectory, distribution of the signal duration at each sub-regions and short-circuit frequency is used to evaluate the weld quality. The weighted penalty, which is determined experimentally, is imposed for each abnormal signal. Performance of the proposed method is compared with the Simpson's method under the conditions of shielding gas reduction, workpiece surface contamination and joint gap in the butt and fillet welds. Although the proposed method predicts the weld quality with reasonable accuracy, further modification and extension to other metal transfer modes are needed as a further study.