Robot automation systems are rapidly taking the place of the human work force. One of the benefits is that this change provides the human work force with the time to spend on more creative tasks. The highest population of robots is in spot welding, spray painting, material handling, and arc welding. Spot welding and spray painting applications are mostly in the automotive industry. However, arc...

Due to lack of comprehensive experimental studies on welding processes, and to better understand the mechanisms behind these processes, especially the weld pool shape variations suspected due to Marangoni Effect or surface tension shear stress, a two-dimensional simulation model was developed to study the physics of gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW). Experimental spot-welds on Ti-5Al-5Mo-5V-3Cr w...

A skilled welder determines the weld joint penetration from his/her observation of the weld pool surface during the welding process. This paper addresses the characterization of the 3D weld pool surface in gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW), i.e., extracting a set of characteristic parameters from the 3D weld pool surface to determine the backside bead width that measures the degree of weld joint ...

Observing the weld pool and measuring its geometrical parameters is a key issue for developing the next generation intelligent welding machine and modeling complex welding process. In the past few years, different techniques have been applied, but the dynamic specular weld pool surface and the strong weld arc complicate these approaches and make the observation difficult. To resolve the problem...

The purpose of vision-based sensing devices in the welding industry is to electronically replicate the role of a skilled welder and emulate the human eye with a light-sensing device such as camera and the human brain with a computer algorithm that interprets the images. Just as an optical feedback from human eye guides the human welder, optical feedback in this electronic system would be used t...