Automation of GTAW Process

Abstract

The soundness of welds is primarily determined by the quality of the ischolar_main pass. In order to ensure quality welds with full penetration, the gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) process is widely used in industry. Usually, the quality of manual GTA welding almost solely depends on the experience of individual welders, but the quality of automatic welding is greatly influenced by proper selection and control of welding parameters to overcome the influences from gravity, arc force, surface tension, heat accumulation, joint preparation and fit up precision, etc. Consequently, an automatic-welding system with penetration enhancing activating flux (PEAF) may easily resulting good welding quality, especially in shop floor welding without the joint preparation and good fit up. Automatic GTAW Process is being used widely in the manufacturing industries to weld the pressure vessels, irrespective of the material and its thermal conductivities. Optimal performance of any welding process is based on choosing the right combination of input parameters by trial and error method. This paper deals with the development of an automatic welding system by converting the existing welding machine in to a full fledged automatic machine by addition of wire feeder, a servo controlled carriage, etc. to obtain the optimal combination of input parameters in order to achieve a good quality of weld as per code requirements. Experiments show that the welding quality on steel plates was very successful by using WEAVER and carriage with activated flux.