A CONTROL TECHNIQUE FOR SHIELDED METAL ARC WELDING IMPROVEMENT
Abstract
Shielded metal arc welding remains popular for cost-effective manufacturing of joiningmaterials, and seems to be quite common in a large number of engineering applications.However, in order to achieve reliable quality, the lack of skilful welders appears to be acrucial situation which is now being discussed. Therefore, this paper presents a solution tomake the most of commercial arc welding machines, with a system capable of improvingboth quality and quantity. A control technique with the definite ability to increase thewelding quality is proposed by automatically varying the arc length in a repeating patternduring the melting mechanism. For this idea, the hysteresis concept was applied as a keycontroller to preform regulation employing an indirect control through arc voltagefeedback, which yielded the arc distance being varied continuously in a desired band; thisis similar to what most skilful welders usually do. A prototype system is described withdetails that provide researchers with some convenient shortcuts for repeating thetechnique. Validation using an experimental rig was conducted, and the results illustratethat the proposed technique was able to give a satisfactory arc variation to the weld processthat is associated with the melting mechanism. Different results from case studies are alsodescribed in this paper indicating that, with the system, the quality of the resulting weldswas improved. Therefore, it can be envisaged that the technique will be a potential benefitfor usage in electric arc welding.
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