Abstract
As the world wind energy market grows rapidly, the productions of wind power generation equipment have recently increased, but manufacturers are not able meet this requirement. Particularly offshore wind energy industry is one of the most popular renewable energy sectors. To generalize welding processes, the welding automation is considered for steel structure manufacturing in offshore wind energy to get high quality and productivity. Welding technology in construction of the wind towers is depended on progress productivity. In addition, the life of wind tower structures should be considered by taking account of the natural weathering and the load it endures. The root passes are typically deposited using Gas Tungsten Arc Welding(GTAW) with a specialized backing gas shield. Not only the validation consists of welders experienced in determining the welding productivity of the baseline welding procedure, but also the standard testing required by the ASME section IX and API1104 codes, toughness testing was performed on the completed field welds. This paper presents the welding characteristics of the root-pass welding of high tensile steel in manufacturing of offshore wind tower. Based on the result from welding experiments, optimal welding conditions were selected after analyzing correlation between welding parameters(peak current, background current and wire feed rate) and back-bead geometry such as back-bead width(mm) and back-bead height performing root-pass welding experiment under various conditions. Furthermore, a response surface approach has been applied to provide an algorithm to predict an optimal welding quality.
