• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.59-66
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• 2016

The Gas Metal Arc(GMA) welding, called Metal Inert Gas(MIG) welding, has been an important component in manufacturing industries. A key technology for robotic welding processes is seam tracking system, which is critical to improve the welding quality and welding capacities. The objectives of this study were to develop the intelligent and cost-effective algorithms for image processing in GMA welding which based on the laser vision sensor. Welding images were captured from the CCD camera and then processed by the proposed algorithm to track the weld joint location. The proposed algorithms that commonly used at the present stage were verified and compared to obtain the optimal one for each step in image processing. Finally, validity of the proposed algorithms was examined by using weld seam images obtained with different welding environments for image processing. The results proved that the proposed algorithm was quite excellent in getting rid of the variable noises to extract the feature points and centerline for seam tracking in GMA welding and could be employed for general industrial application.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.605-610
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• 2008

Through welding fabrication, user can feel unsatisfaction of surface quality because of welded defects, Generally speaking, these are called weld defects. For checking these defects effectively without time loss effectively, weldability estimation system setup is an urgent thing for detecting whole specimen quality. In this study, by laser vision camera, catching a rawdata on welded specimen profiles, treating vision processing with these data, qualitative defects are estimated from getting these information at first. At the same time, for detecting quantitative defects, whole specimen weldability estimation is pursued by multifeature pattern recognition, which is a kind of fuzzy pattern recognition. For user friendly, by weldability estimation results are shown each profiles, final reports and visual graphics method, user can easily determined weldability. By applying these system to welding fabrication, these technologies are contribution to on-line weldability estimation.

• Korean Journal of Metals and Materials
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• v.50 no.6
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• pp.455-462
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• 2012

Al-Si coated boron steel and Zn coated DP steel plates were laser-welded to manufacture a Tailor Welded Blank (TWB) for a car body frame. Hot-stamping heat treatment ($900^{\circ}C$, 5 min) was applied to the TWB weld, and the microstructural change and transformation mechanism were investigated in the Al-rich area near the bond line of the Al-Si coated steel side. There was Al-rich area with a single phase, $Fe_3(Al,Si)$, which was transformed to ${\alpha}-Fe$ (Ferrite) after the heat treatment. It could be explained that the $Fe_3(Al,Si)$ phase was transformed to ${\alpha}-Fe$ during heat treatment at $900^{\circ}C$ for 5 min and the resultant ${\alpha}-Fe$ phase was not transformed by rapid cooling. Before the heat treatment, the microstructures around the $Fe_3(Al,Si)$ phase consisted of martensite, bainite and ${\alpha}-Fe$ while they were transformed to martensite and ${\delta}-Fe$ after the heat treatment. Due to the heat treatment, Al was diffused to the $Fe_3(Al,Si)$ and this resulted in an increase of Al content to 0.7 wt% around the Al-rich area. If the weld was held at $900^{\circ}C$ for 5 min it was transformed to a mixture of austenite (${\gamma}$) and ${\delta}-Fe$, and only ${\gamma}$ was transformed to the martensite by water cooling while the ${\delta}-Fe$ was remained unchanged.

• The Journal of Korean Academy of Prosthodontics
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.545-566
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• 1999

The use of pure titanium and titanium alloys have been increased recently in fixed, removable prosthodontics and implant fields as a framework. But when they were used for superstructures of implant or metal framework of removable prosthesis, welding is necessary to reconnect the fracture site to control the casting distortions. To overcome the difficulties in soldering the titanium due to high oxidation property, much effort have been devoted. In this study, some of mechanical properties were compared between pure titanium and Ti-6Al-4V alloy by using after welding, electron beam welding technique and tungsten arc welding. Mechanical properties such as tensile strength, yield strength, elongation and microhardness were measured. And, in order to compare the effect of welding site and surrounding metal tissue according to the welding condition, SEM photographs were taken and element distribution was observed by Wave Dispersion Spectroscopy. Through analyses of the data, following results were obtained; 1. In items such as tensile strength, yield strength and elongation according to the welding techniques of pure titanium, only tungsten arc welded group showed significant lower value than other groups(P<0.05). 2. In items such as tensile strength and yield strength according to the welding techniques of Ti-6Al-4V alloy, control group and tungsten arc welded group showed significant difference among all the groups(P<0.05). 3. Ti-6Al-4V alloy exhibited significantly greater elongation than control group when the laser welding method and electron beam welding method were used, and elongation showed increasing tendency. 4. Pure titanium specimens exhibited increasing tendency of microhardness regardless of the weld-ing technique applied, and especially tungsten arc welded group demonstrated a great increase of microhardness than parent metal. 5. There was no hardness change in laser welded group and electron beam welded group of Ti-6Al-4V alloy, but in tungsten arc welded group, hardness changed greatly from parent metal to weld seam. 6. Through the metallographic examination and scanning electron microscopy, laser welding caused central fusion and recristallizations were formed and tungsten arc welding caused localized fusion to 0.3-0.7mm from the surface.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.142-150
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• 2001

Automotive manufactures have taken more interests in tailored sheet metals for improving the rigidity, weight reduction, crash durability, and cost savings so that their application to auto-bodies has been increased. However, since the tailored sheet metals do not behave like un-welded sheet metals in press forming operations, the stamping engineers no longer rely only on conventional forming techniques. Futhermore, there is no clear understanding of the characteristics of welded metal which influence the overall press formability of tailored sheet metals. Recently, the computer simulations are prevailing for the evaluation of the formability. Unfortunately, the mechanical property of tailored sheet metal has to be quantitatively defined in the simulation. In this study, the analytical equations are formulated in order to find the mechanical properties of the welded metal in the tailored sheet metal welded by co$_2$laser. Based on force distribution assumption, the constitutive behavior of the welded metal is investigated using uniaxial tensile test results of base metals and tailored sheet metal. Then, the strength coefficient, work-hardening exponent, and plastic strain ratio of laser-welded metal are calculate from those of base metals and tailored sheet metal. In addition, the existence of weld defects in the welded metal is indirectly detected by examining the slop of strength coefficient of the welded metal.

• Laser Solutions
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.25-32
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• 2007

The effect of welding speed on the weldability, microstructures, hardness, tensile property of Nd:YAG laser welding joint in 600MPa grade precipitation hardening high strength steel was investigated. A shielding gas was not used, and bead-on-plate welding was performed using various welding speeds at a power of 3.5kW. Porosity in the joints occurred at 1.8m/min, but were not observed over the welding speed of 2.1m/min. However, spatter occurred over the welding speed of 6.6m/min. The hardness was the highest at heat affected zone(HAZ) near fusion zone(FZ), and was decreased on approaching to the base metal. The maximum hardness increased with increasing welding speed. The microstructure of FZ was composed of coarse grain boundary ferrite and bainite(upper) but the HAZ near the FZ contained bainite(Lower) and fine ferrite at a low welding speed. With increasing welding speed, ferrite at the FZ and the HAZ became finely and upper binite changed to lower bainite. In a perpendicular tensile test to the weld line, all specimens were fractured at the base metal, and the tensile strength and the yield strength of joints was equal to those of raw material. Elongation was found to be lower than that of the raw material.

• Laser Solutions
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.1-9
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• 2006

In this paper, we investigated the characteristics of fatigue fracture on TB(Tailored Blank) weldment by comparing the fatigue crack propagation characteristics of base metal with those of TB welded sheet used for vehicle body panels. We also investigated the influence of center crack on the fatigue characteristic of laser weld sheet of same thickness. We conducted an experiment on fatigue crack propagation on the base metal specimen of 1.2mm thickness of cold-rolled metal sheet(SPCSD) and 2.0mm thickness of hot-rolled metal sheet(SAPH440) and 1.2+2.0mm TB specimen. We also made an experiment on fatigue crack propagation on 2.0+2.0mm and 1.2+1.2mm thickness TB specimen which had center crack. The characteristics of fatigue crack growth on the base metal were different from those on 1.2+2.0mm thickness TB specimen. The fatigue crack growth rate of the TB welded specimens is slower in low stress intensity factor range $({\Delta}K)$ region and faster in high${\Delta}K$ region than that of the base metal specimens. The slant crack angle slightly influenced the crack propagation of the TB specimen of 2.0+2.0mm thinkness.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2004.08a
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• pp.499-503
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• 2004

This application-oriented paper describes an automated welding carriage system to weld a thin corrugated workpiece with welding seam tracking function. Hyundai Heavy Industries Corporation has developed an automatic welding carriage system, which utilizes pulsed plasma arc welding process for corrugated sheets. It can obtain high speed welding more than 2 times faster than traditional TIG based welding system. The aim of this development is to increase the productivity by using automatic plasma welding carriage systems, to track weld seam line using vision sensor automatically, and finally to provide a convenience to operator in order to carry out welding. In this paper a robust image processing and a distance based tracking algorithms are introduced for corrugated workpiece welding. The automatic welding carriage system is controlled by the programmable logic controller(PLC), and the automatic welding seam tracking system is controlled by the industrial personal computer(IPC) equipped with embedded OS. The system was tested at actual workpiece to show the feasibility and performance of proposed algorithm and to confirm the reliability of developed controller.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.99-106
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• 1996

Development of an automatic TIG welding system incorporating a vision sensor and torch control mechanism leads to an improved welding quality and greater production efficiency. The automatic welding system should be greatly restricted in its size and weight for the LNG(Liquefied Natural Gas) storage tank and also provide a unique torch rotating mechanism which keeps the torch tip in the constant position while the angle is changed continuously to maintain the welding torch substantially perpendicular to the weld line. The developed system is driven by two translation axes X, Z and one rotational axis. A moving line window method is adopted to the image recognition of the corrugated membranes with specular reflection. This method decides original laser stripe patterns in image which is affected by multi-reflection. A self-teaching algorithm, which guides the automatic welding machine with the information provided by the CCD camera without any previous learning of a reference trajectory, was developed for tracking the corrugated membrane of the LNG tank along the weld line.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
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• 2002.05a
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• pp.48-53
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• 2002

Sheet or plate bending is one of the most important industrial metal forming processes. And considerable attention has been focused on gaining a better understanding of many of bending characteristics. One of defaults in bending process is the springback. In this study, the springback characteristics of tailor-welded strips in U-bending process was investigated. Furthermore, not only the relationships between the springback and the process variables such as the geometry of the tools and thickness combination of workpiece but also the heat effect which affects the springback due to welding process was experimentally considered. First, tailor-welded strips are joined by the laser welding process and consisted of two types of thickness combinations of the SCPI sheet, 0.8t${\times}$1.2t and 0.8${\times}$1.6t to investigate the effect of different thickness combination on the springback. Secondly, two different directionally welded strips, one was welded along the centerline of the strip-width and the other was along the centerline of strip-length, were adopted to compare the effects of the location of weld line on the springback. And three punch profile radii of 3, 9, and 15 m were used. Some cases of the experimental results were simulated by using a commercial FEM code, PAM-STAMP to compare the experimental results to the analytical ones.