Abstract
In case of manufacturing the high quality welds or pipeline, the full penetration weld has to be made along the weld joint. Thus the root pass welding is very important and has to be selected carefully. In this study, an experimental method for the selection of optimal welding condition was proposed in the root pass welding which was done along the V-grooved butt weld joint. This method uses the response surface analysis in which the width and height of back bead were chosen as the quality variables of the weld. The overall desirability function, which is the combined desirability function for the two quality variables, was used as the objective function for getting the optimal welding condition. In the experiments, the target values of the back bead width and the height are 6mm and zero respectively for the V-grooved butt weld joint of 8mm thickness mild steel. The optimal welding conditions could predict the back bead profile(bead width and height) as 6.003mm and -0.003mm. From a series of welding test, it was revealed that a uniform and full penetration weld bead can be obtained by adopting the optimal welding condition which was determined according to the method proposed.