Weld Monitoring in Automotive/Transportation Industry

Resistance Spot Welding (RSW) is a critical welding process useful for stainless steel vehicle manufacturing in the automotive or transportation industry. There are many advantages of RSW. Some of them are as follows –

  • RSW is an economic welding process
  • RSW is highly adaptable to a wide range of materials as well as thickness
  • RSW is a process with a short cycle time
  • RSW is a robust process with some level of tolerance to individual variations
Automotive/Transportation Industry

Why Weld-CHRON Arc Weld Timer?

Despite the above advantages, RSW faces a significant problem of the inconsistent quality of welding, welding variations, and a substantial number of redundant welds. The interpretation and uncertainty in weld quality attribute to tip wear, sheet metal surface debris, and fluctuations in the power supply. As a common practice, the automotive industry adds many redundant welds to actuate the assembly’s structural integrity in the welding process.
During recent years, there is a responsibility placed on automotive OEMs for improvisation in productivity and reduction in the nonvalue adding activity, to stand the global competition. The emphasis lies in removing the redundant welds, which significantly increases the need for weld quality monitoring and minimization of weld process variability.

A weld monitor or a weld data monitoring system using arc timer or sensory arc timer, even welding arc timer, is useful for monitoring real-time welding and visualization of variations during the RSW process. Thus, the Weld monitor or the welding control equipment will help the online evaluation of welding quality.

 

In the last few years, non-intrusive electronic sensors such as weld monitor current sensors, algorithms processing the signal, and computational intelligence such as Weld Counter help the industry. Soldered with drastic reductions in computing and network hardware costs, they are possibly developing independent, intelligent resistance spot welding systems that overcome all the above shortcomings.