• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.314-319
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• 2002

The Automation and Control Group at the University of Brasilia is developing an automatic welding station based on an industrial robot and a controllable welding machine. Several techniques were applied in order to improve the quality of the welding joints. This paper deals with the implementation of a laser-based computer vision system to guide the robotic manipulator during the welding process. Currently the robot is taught to follow a prescribed trajectory which is recorded a repeated over and over relying on the repeatability specification from the robot manufacturer. The objective of the computer vision system is monitoring the actual trajectory followed by the welding torch and to evaluate deviations from the desired trajectory. The position errors then being transfer to a control algorithm in order to actuate the robotic manipulator and cancel the trajectory errors. The computer vision systems consists of a CCD camera attached to the welding torch, a laser emitting diode circuit, a PC computer-based frame grabber card, and a computer vision algorithm. The laser circuit establishes a sharp luminous reference line which images are captured through the video camera. The raw image data is then digitized and stored in the frame grabber card for further processing using specifically written algorithms. These image-processing algorithms give the actual welding path, the relative position between the pieces and the required corrections. Two case studies are considered: the first is the joining of two flat metal pieces; and the second is concerned with joining a cylindrical-shape piece to a flat surface. An implementation of this computer vision system using parallel computer processing is being studied.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.59-72
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• 1994

This paper presents an on-line quality monitoring and control method to obtain a uniform weld quality in gas metal arc welding (GMAW) processes. The geometrical parameters of the weld pool such as the top bead width and the penetration depth plus half back width are utilized to assess the integrity of the weld quality. Since a good quality weld is characterized by a relatively high depth-to-width ratio in its dimensions, the second geometrical parameter is regulated to a desired one. The monitoring variables are the surface temperatures measured at various points on the top surface of the weldment which are strongly related to the formation of the weld pool The relationship between the measured temperatures and the weld pool size is implemented on the multilayer perceptrons which are powerful for realization of complex mapping characteristics through training by samples. For on-line quality monitoring and control, it is prerequisite to estimate the weld pool sizes in the region of transient states. For this purpose, the time history of the surface temperatures is used as the input to the neural estimator. The control purpose is to obtain a uniform weld quality. In this research, the weld pool size is directly regulated to a desired one. The proposed controller is composed of a neural pool size estimator, a neural feedforward controller and a conventional feedback controller. The pool size estimator predicts the weld pool size under growing. The feedforward controller compensates for the nonlinear characteristics of the welding process. A series of simulation studies shows that the proposed control method improves the overall system response in the presence of changes in torch travel speed during GMA welding and guarantees the uniform weld quality.

• Bulletin of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.5-12
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• 1977

In shipyard production processes, lots of steel plates are assembled by welding. Some rectangular steel plates are buttwelded to build a large block in panel production lines. There are some advantages to take the tandem arc welding in butt joints of rectangular plates with respect to welding speed. Hence, the thermal stresses and the temperature distribution of the tandem arc welding are studied in this paper. The solutions in the case of the infinite plate with two instantaneous point heat sources have been obtained. And then the solutions have been extended to the case of two moving heat sources corresponding to the tandem arc welding with the aid of Duhamel's superposition integral. It was found that the temperature distribution was good agreement with the results of the experiments by Rosenthal and Park and the thermal stresses calculated were acceptable with respect to a physical phenomenon. These solutions are able to be applied to the problem such as a line heating.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.180.6-180
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• 2001

Welding/soldering automation is one of the most important manufacturing issues in order to lower the cost, increase the quality, and avoid labor problems. An off-line programming, OLP, is one of the powerful methods to solve this kind of diver sity problem, Unless an OLP system is ready for the path optimization in welding/soldering, a waste of time and cost is unavoidable due to an inefficient path in welding/soldering processes. Therefore, this study attempts to obtain path optimization using a genetic algorithm based on artificial intelligences. The problem of the welding path optimization is defined as conventional TSP (traveling salesman problem), but still paths have to go through welding lines. An improved genetic algorithm was suggested and the problem was formulated as a TSP problem considering ...

• Laser Solutions
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.21-24
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• 2008

Hybrid laser welding technology is a good process to reduce a thermal distortion and increase the productivity. However, it requires a high investment and a massive modification of the fabrication line such as a gantry system, milling machine for the edge preparation, high power laser system and weld machine. Therefore the development of an economical laser welding system is a crucial point to apply this system in shipbuilding yard. In this study, a portable hybrid laser welding carriage was developed for I-butt joint without edge milling. It is expected that the carriage type system could reduce investment cost.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.82-86
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• 2000

Gas metal arc welding(GMAW) is regarded as one of the best candidate for welding automation in industrial joining application. It is important to monitor the weld quality for the high performance weld automation. In GMAW, weld quality is closely related to arc stability especially. In this paper, arc light signal is measured and spectrum analyzed to the detect the variation of the weld quality. The FFT of the signal showed that the amplitude variance of FFT power spectrum was very large in poor weld process such as the decrease of weld bead width and height. The results show that it is possible to detect the weld defect position in weld process.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.34-39
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• 2012

In this study, the friction welding experiment was performed by using the design of experiment. And the signal data acquired by acoustic emission sensor were analyzed to predict the tensile strength of friction welding part at friction welding process for AZ31 magnesium alloy. A dimensionless coefficient($\phi_{AE}$), which consisted in the square of AE rms and variance, was defined as the characteristic of friction welding and the prediction equation was obtained by using linear regression. As the result of analysis, it was seen that the correlation between predicted and measured values became very close and on-line prediction of the ensile strength was possible in friction welding part.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.96-101
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• 1999

Microstructures and mechanical properties of weldments were studied for EH36 TMCP higher-strength hull steel with electrogas welding jprocess. In case of a newly designed EH36 TMCP steel for large heat input welding process, the Microstructures of HAZ shows more narrow width of grain coarsed region than that of conventional EH36 TMCP weldments, the amount of acicular ferrite, which is beneficial to impact toughness, increased while the amount of grain-boundary ferrite decreased. Charpy V-notched impact tests show that a newly designed EH36 TMCP steel weldment satisfies all the requirement of specifications, especially at the fusion line +2mm where the conventional EH36 TMCP steel fails to exceed the requirement.

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.26-28
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• 2007

This research is concerned with a study of failure strength evaluation on heat element gap at resistance welding. The failure strength of resistance welded joint is changed by welding factor like as current(power level), welding time(total energy), pressure etc. and another heat element factor like as number of element line, element gap etc. Tensile-shear tests were carried out with the single-lap specimen using polypropylene(PP). The failure mechanism and optimization of gap was discussed in order to explain the tensile-shear strength evaluation on heat element gap at resistance welding. Orthogonal array was used by fractional factorial design for efficient experiments.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.108-118
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• 1994

In the present study, the dynamic crack initiation toughness and total absorbed energy behavior of Heat Affected Zone(HAZ) was experimentally evaluated for SS41 steel welding. The materials were submerged arc-welded SS41 steel plate with thickness 19mm. The test temperature range was from $20^{\circ}C$(room temperature) to $-70^{\circ}C$ The HAZ of welding were divided into three sub-zones for analysis; H1, H2, H3, according to the distance from the fushion line. From the experimental studies, the reference value of dynamic crack initiation toughness $(J_{Id(R)})$ can be use to estimate dynamic fracture toughness characteristics of steel welding.